So to have a Microsoft PR guy [who was known to have shilled for MS] on the team is a little tricky here.
I am heavily for open source software. I’ve used Star Office and it’s a good program (though I do have MS Office myself). In fact, back in the day when I was an admin assistant, Star Office used to help me retrieve MS Office files which had corrupted due to the poor quality of Microsoft’s products (my files had a lot of photos in them, and MS couldn’t handle that for some reason and would sometimes crash). Star Office saved my bacon more than a few times.
I won’t jump to conclusions here, as I do know that Patrick is asking for people of all stripes to be on his teams – people who disagree with him or whose interests do compete. But, I believe that once all the facts are in, open source will be the way to go. With some of the others listed on the team, I expect open source software to get a good hearing. I hope that the new governor’s team will be fair, but this does bear close watching. Brian Burke is a known shill lobbyist for Microsoft, one of the biggest bullies on the block, and I hope his arguments will be taken with a huge grain of salt.
[Update: My reader also sends me another link which has more information on each member of the team, from a poster on Slashdot. His conclusion? Same as mine…that this group should be watched for its final recommendations, but it could be a fair group. By the way, Charles SteelFisher was Patrick’s tech guy, and I think it’s fair to say (though I won’t put words in his mouth) that he “gets it” in regards to open source software.]
the working group includes Louis Gutierrez, who until very recently was the state’s CIO and is totally in favor of open document format. It’s definitely a fair fight on that committee!
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That was his second stint as CIO. In between he was CIO for EOHHS. Has always been and would be an outstanding addition to any administration.
My guess is that Microsoft is at the table for the potential jobs they could bring to the state. I’m very much in favor of that approach.
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When it comes to open source software, I’d love to see a statement from this working group or the state CIO that says something like, “The commonwealth of Massachusetts will use open source software wherever it can on all greenfield applications and new software investments.”
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Meaning, for any new technology investments, open source software should get the nod unless there is a legitimate reason for using a proprietary competitor. “We’ve already invested $X million in Microsoft/IBM/Sun/Cisco/whoever technologies, so for compatibility and sunk cost reasons, we should buy more of their products” is not a legitimate reason, although it is very typical in any large organization.
joel klein was the lead guy in the justice department in the case AGAINST microsoft. then he became superintendent of nyc schools. by your logic, they’d have switched all 100,000 nyc school computers to linux by now….
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it’d be weird if burke weren’t on the team. plus he’s a good guy. “shill” is so inflammatory. is a school superintendent a “shill”? the head of the nurses union a “shill”? was patrick a “shill” for texaco?
It’s not like there was a shortage of amply qualified people in MA to choose from. And MS isn’t a big employer in the state. Novell, for instance, is HQ’ed here, and is in the interesting position of both supporting open source (it bought Suse and Ximian, both open source companies, and employs one of the leads for Samba, the interconnection technology MS would love to kill), and is currently being accused of selling Linux out due to its recent agreement with MS (that’s another story for another time). I can think of lots of people who would be more relevant for Massachusetts technology.
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That said, as others have pointed out, it’s not exactly a stacked decked, and diversity isn’t such a terrible thing. And if he’s a good guy, great.
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Shill is inflammatory, but as one of the lead people fighting the ODF standard for MS, I think a fair case could be made for the label in this context. Fact is, MS needs to keep its file formats proprietary in order to maintain MS Office’s dominance. If file formats were truly standardized, MS would have to compete on (gasp!) features and value, rather than rely on continued dominance through network effects. Although I’ve found that Office is generally more capable than alternatives like OpenOffice, it is also more expensive (OpenOffice is free: http://www.openoffic…). Margins would go down, as would market share. Horrific for MS, not so bad for the rest of us.
both are good, but I want to remind folks what the difference is…
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open source means that the source code — the computer code which is then compiled and run on the computer — is publicly available. This means that anyone with the code could change things inside the program fairly easily, so that the program behaves differently. This is a bit like owning a 57 Chevy — you pop the hood, and it takes some knowledge and work, but you could change the engine, the exhaust system, the spark plugs, etc. fairly easily.
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Code that isn’t open source doesn’t allow you to pop the hood. It’s locked, and picking the lock is against the law. Examples include Microsoft Windows and Office, Lotus Notes, Adobe Photoshop, etc.
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open standards mean that it doesn’t matter what application you use, everyone can access the data. So, if you create a text document in App 1, then App 2 can easily open it and understand the contents. It may render them slightly differently, and the features of App 2 may allow you to do things that you couldn’t do in App 1… but the data itself is open. An example of this is HTML… it doesn’t matter if you use IExplorer or Firefox, you can see the web. It might render a little differently, but the data is there and usable. (note: there are slight differences, and MS has introduced web-based code that only works on windows, but generally speaking, this is the idea). Another example would be a spreadsheet file that was saved as ‘tab delimited’ or ‘comma delimited’.
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Standards that aren’t open are like .xls files. You can’t simply use any spreadsheet app to open them because Microsoft intentionally makes the files hard to read by others.
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In my opinion, this is a major liability, particularly for government. The data belongs to the people, and we should not have to rely on Microsoft software existing/being cheap enough/working well enough in the future for us to access the people‘s data. It’s an unnecessary risk with data that is expected to outlive any particular corporation.
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While I do tend to favor open source projects, I wouldn’t demand that my government use open source projects — their cost (acquisition plus maintenance) might be higher, they may not be as feature rich, etc. However, I do think it is reasonable to demand that the government use open standards, because that data belongs to the people and should never be at the mercy of any particular entity’s existence and good will.
Good post! Open standards are a need-to-have, open source is a really-nice-to-have (though others will differ with me on that point).
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One minor quibble: It’s not necessarily illegal to pop the hood on closed source software, it’s just really hard and doesn’t get you far. What is illegal is breaking the terms of the software license, which generally doesn’t let you, say, install MS Office on 1000 machines (unless you have a 1000 user license).
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That’s where open source shines. You are free to pop the hood, mess around, and then give away a copy of your souped up ’57 Chevy to your neighbor. How sweet is that? Which brings up an important point about software: it is not a rival good. Meaning that, unlike a car, making a copy in no way deprives the original user of making full use of the software (unlike, say, lending your ’57 Chevy- you can’t both drive at once to different places).
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This is where proprietary (closed) software is fundamentally screwy. The whole business model only works by taking away one of software’s greatest strengths! That is, MS and others make a lot of money by making their software artificially scarce. Linux and OpenOffice don’t have the same business model, so their creators are more than happy for us all to make copies and improvements to their software.
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That said, there are areas where the best proprietary software is better than the best open source software (although the gap is generally closing). But when selecting such software, it is critical to avoid vendor lock-in, so one (be it state or private) can have the freedom to chose an open source alternative in the future.
Microsoft has already annouced an open source project to translate from Word to ODF and back. This should answer most concerns.
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What doesn’t make sense for Microsoft to do is adopt ODF as their standard format. No company wants to wait on a standards board to drive innovation.
Definitely a moot point when it comes to Microsoft Office, OpenOffice, StarOffice, etc… but not for a different reason: Google Office is better than both of them, is web-based, and free!
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… given Microsoft’s checkered past with respect to Open Source, and the obvious benefits (to them) of maintaining the network effects of proprietary file formats, I will withhold judgement on this one for now. I just downloaded the November preview and will test.
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I am glad that the actions of MA and other entities have compelled Microsoft to pursue such efforts (I feel confident in saying that this wouldn’t have happened otherwise).
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Re: standards, I think what we see in general is that companies eschew standards in the early phases of a technology, where doing otherwise would slow them down and impede innovation. But once a technology matures, the benefits of standardization outweigh the constraints. Imagine, for example, if Dell had its own version of the USB port. Or if there was no standard for residential voltage and plug shape. For more on this and other open source insights, listen to this excellent podcast by Clayton Christensen of Harvard Business School.
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That said, I would argue that Office suite file formats are a mature technology.
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If MicroSoft could be taken at face value, you are correct, and is should answer most concerns. However, MicroSoft has a very clear [ history http://en.wikipedia…. ] of embrace, extend and extinquish on standards and technology (if you haven’t seen it you need to read more legal briefs…). Are they suddenly different on just this issue? I don’t think so…
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What makes you think that MicroSoft is, at all, about “innovation”? They are not and never have been, about innovation. ODF is innovation. They are trying to kill it because it interferes with they’re profits.
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You should read some of the history rather than sticking so strictly to the marketing.
My opinion is based on reading marketing material? LOL. It’s based on what moves business – money. (BTW – I wrote this and my last post from my Mac – I also have a PC with XP and Red Hat).
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To suggest that Microsoft has never been about innovation is just plain ridiculous. There is a long list of MS innovations including their development of the XMLHttpRequest object in IE 5 and Outlook 2000 that started the recent prevalence Web 2.0 applications on the web. Ironically they have fallen well behind on the Web 2.0 front.
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I am very familiar with the “embrace, extend and extinguish” policies of MS and the many other corporations that employ it (some with more success than others). Microsoft is driven by money (as most non-profits are) and that is exactly why they need to make the ODF conversion work. Thanks to the fine work Massachusetts and others have done, MS now has a real incentive to see this through and I expect they will.
Here’s a WSJ article that debates whether or not MS is an innovator or not. Not very good, but timely! XMLHttpRequest is Microsoft’s biggest innovation that I can think of. What else? Most of the rest of their ‘innovation’ is improvements of existing stuff. Which wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing if MS didn’t have a monopoly in operating systems and office suites.
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I think MS’s motives now are to do the minimum to make entities like Massachusetts happy, but still pull tricks like leave VBA code as binary blobs in their Open XML formats (as documented here, which makes a large class of Excel files not particularly ‘open’. It’s not like it’s that hard to represent code in xml.
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The issues and formats are complex enough that I feel that MS can pretty much meet any standard for ODF support mandated by MA or similar, while still doing snarky things that make using software other than Office a PITA.
I would argue that innovation is more than brand new ideas. Taking something that exists and making it better is innovation in my book (maybe not yours?).
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Microsoft enabled (among others) the PC revolution. I’d say that counts as a major innovation.
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Is the iPod innovative – I think so, although there were plenty of mp3 players on the market before the iPod.
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Was the Mac innovative – I would say yes even though Xerox Parc created the GUI.
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To claim that Microsoft has never innovated is IMHO a bogus claim. Yes they could be alot more innovative but they are what they are.
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Thanks for the steer to the WSJ article. I agree, very timely to this discussion, but not really substantive (kind of like a Hannity and Colmes).
Open Office will support both OpenDocument Format (ODF) and Microsoft’s OpenXML. So it looks like it will be easier on the Technology workgroup.
I agree with everyone that ODF is definitely a good thing for the Commonwealth. But I think there are a number of other issues that could also be addressed in this forum. While ODF compliance could reduce annual Microsoft Office licensing costs let’s not forget the money spent on Windows Servers (File, SQL, Exchange, SharePoint, etc.), CALs (client access licenses), and desktop operating systems (when buying new PCs). Unless Open Source applications and operating systems are also considered to replace their Microsoft counterparts, Microsoft will always be a major player in Commonwealth technology. So having them represented in the group could be beneficial.
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So where are the other inefficiencies and cost savings that could be addressed by a new administration? How about telecom, data communications, hardware suppliers, etc.? And shall I say it (I know it can be a bad word), Consolidation. Consolidation of storage, email servers, database servers, and yes, even datacenters. While not a popular topic it can be a source of great cost savings. What can be done better, faster, cheaper? (yeah, I hate that saying too)
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Thoughts?
Open formats I can agree with, open source I cannot . . . in most cases.
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On any public or private entity with more than a few PC’s, implementing open source software generally increases your support spend. Although you get into bed with a three headed monster, if you get Windows and Office, everyone in your organization will be able to open and read everything you create and everything any of your customers create.
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We may not like it, but Windows and Office are installed everywhere in the world.
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Finally, on the security front, anyone can alter the source code. Unless someone else points out a security flaw or you take the time to go through several hundred, if not several thousand, lines of code to find it, the Commonwealth risks loosing data which depending on where implemented could include tax records, criminal history, birth and death records, etc. Too high a risk for me.