One of Microsoft’s major strategies in recent years has been to take control of or subvert standards and licensing mechanisms in ways that ensure that they can throw their considerable weight around in ways that will continue to make life difficult for those in the open source<\/a> universe.<\/p>\n

One of their most successful arenas has been in office documents, where their Microsoft Office formats (esp. Microsoft Word) have become de facto “standards”, typically without the (many, many) people involved thinking once (much less twice) about the implications thereof. Being someone who deliberately doesn’t run any Microsoft software on my computers, I’m particularly aware of just how many Word documents I get as attachments, and often rant<\/a> about the many problems that can generate.<\/p>\n

The state of Massachusetts is engaged in what could be a very important battle to change this trend. They have an Open Standards Policy<\/a> that recognizes that there is a powerful<\/em> public interest in ensuring that the discussion and ideas that drive and define our government, policies, and ideals can’t be lost or locked up because they’re written, distributed, or stored using closed, proprietary file formats. They are consequently requiring<\/a> that at least the final “official” version of government documents be in a form taken from a list of approved, open formats. It’s all quite wonderful stuff, and I wish them all the success in the world in this important endeavor.<\/p>\n

At the moment, however, Massachusetts officials and Microsoft are involved in key negotiations about how and whether Microsofts Office XML is an “open standard”. At first it seemed that it wasn’t going to be, but now the state says that Microsoft is willing to change some of their policies in a way that would make it acceptable. There are doubts<\/a>, however, and the devil is always in the details.<\/p>\n

Massachusetts is taking open comments<\/a> through the end of March, and I think it’s of enormous importance to all Americans (and no doubt far beyond) how this turns out. If Massachusetts gets this right, along with even a handful of other states (not to mention countries – the EU is engaged in similar discussions<\/a>), then it could have an incredibly powerful positive effect.<\/p>\n

Currently listening to<\/strong>: the title track from Chris Cutler’s very cool new album Twice around the earth<\/cite><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of Microsoft’s major strategies in recent years has been to take control of or subvert standards and licensing mechanisms in ways that ensure that they can throw their considerable weight around in ways that will continue to make life difficult for those in the open source universe. One of their most successful arenas has … Continue reading “Massachusetts may be fighting for the freedom of our documents (and our thoughts)”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_hide_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_featured_image_duplicate_dismissed":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,1,13,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-92","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computing","category-general","category-politics","category-writing"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p90sy-1u","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":578,"url":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/archives\/2007\/06\/14\/see-i-_told_-you-word-was-bad-news-pay-attention-next-time\/","url_meta":{"origin":92,"position":0},"title":"See, I _told_ you Word was bad news! Pay attention next time!","author":"Nic McPhee","date":"14 Jun 07","format":false,"excerpt":"I've been warning people about the many problems with Microsoft Word (and all of Office, really) for years (I gave a talk entitled \"Is Microsoft Word Inherently evil?\" five years ago), with about as much success as Don Quixote. The problem, ultimately, isn't that Microsoft is evil or their software\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Computing"","block_context":{"text":"Computing","link":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/archives\/category\/computing\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":726,"url":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/archives\/2007\/11\/29\/making-software-simpler-instead-of-more-complex\/","url_meta":{"origin":92,"position":1},"title":"Making software simpler instead of more complex","author":"Nic McPhee","date":"29 Nov 07","format":false,"excerpt":"Those crazy kids at KOffice have created a simplified version of their office suite especially geared for kids. A cool feature, though, is that it's fully interoperable with the \"adult\" version of the suite, so teachers\/parents can open documents created by students\/kids and vice versa. Nice. open... has some nice\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Computing"","block_context":{"text":"Computing","link":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/archives\/category\/computing\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":857,"url":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/archives\/2008\/07\/05\/a-tale-of-misery-and-file-format-woe\/","url_meta":{"origin":92,"position":2},"title":"A tale of misery and (file format) woe","author":"Nic McPhee","date":"5 Jul 08","format":false,"excerpt":"photo credit: hradcanska As we were car-less in the UK last year, we would rent wheels at various times when we needed to move all three of us and lots of stuff over what passes for long distances on the small island. Our last rental, for our last week between\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "File formats"","block_context":{"text":"File formats","link":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/archives\/category\/computing\/file-formats\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"Creative Commons License","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/wp-content\/plugins\/photo-dropper\/images\/cc.png?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":300,"url":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/archives\/2006\/01\/16\/links-for-2006-01-16\/","url_meta":{"origin":92,"position":3},"title":"links for 2006-01-16","author":"Nic McPhee","date":"16 Jan 06","format":false,"excerpt":"Why collaborate with Open Source tools. Get Real: Stowe Boyd's Soapbox An interesting article based on the chief WordPress developer. (tags: UMM:IS3221 cms opensource wordPress blogging projectmanagement programming productivity) Once More unto the Breach: Irony, OpenOffice, Open Source, Shared Source, and Microsoft Office (and Standards!) A very interesting piece on\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Daily links"","block_context":{"text":"Daily links","link":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/archives\/category\/daily-links\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":839,"url":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/archives\/2008\/05\/22\/can-we-please-remember-that-m-hasnt-completely-taken-over-the-world\/","url_meta":{"origin":92,"position":4},"title":"Can we please remember that M$ hasn’t completely taken over the world?","author":"Nic McPhee","date":"22 May 08","format":false,"excerpt":"I just had to take four on-line safety courses here at Essex in order to get money from our research grant. I'll spare you the horrors, although I did twitter on about of some of them as I went as a sanity saving device, and will share a couple: \"Keeping\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Computing"","block_context":{"text":"Computing","link":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/archives\/category\/computing\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":715,"url":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/archives\/2007\/11\/21\/if-microsoft-had-designed-gmail\/","url_meta":{"origin":92,"position":5},"title":"If Microsoft had designed GMail","author":"Nic McPhee","date":"21 Nov 07","format":false,"excerpt":"This is hilarious. They walk you through the stepwise changes if Redmond had designed GMail. Thanks to John Naughton for the pointer.","rel":"","context":"In "Computing"","block_context":{"text":"Computing","link":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/archives\/category\/computing\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=92"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=92"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=92"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=92"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}