Opponents to ODF strike back in Massachusetts

Open document format questioned

A Massachusetts Senate committee has released a report criticising the state’s Information Technology Division (ITD), claiming that its “unilateral” plan to move all state employees to use software that reads and writes files in the OpenDocument format was poorly planned, ignored the needs of disabled workers and violated state law.

The Danish government has also said it will launch a four-month pilot programme in September to use the OpenDocument format (ODF), another part of the country’s broad endorsement of open computing standards. The programme will start with Denmark’s finance and science ministries and possibly others, says Adam Lebech, head of the IT governance division within the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation.

Denmark’s decision follows Belgium, which recently mandated that its federal agencies must use software that can read ODF documents by September 2007.

In Massachusetts, the Senate Committee on Post Audit and Oversight, headed by state Senator Marc R Pacheco, released a report entitled Open Standards, Closed Government: ITD’s Deliberate Disregard for Public Process.

The report criticises the ITD for failing to evaluate the cost of the proposal, the impact it could have on the state’s public records, limitations on IT accessibility for the disabled, and ultimately for violating state law.

State CIO Louis Gutierrez did not return calls for comment.

Masssachusetts made headlines worldwide last September when then-state CIO Peter Quinn finalised a plan to begin migrating to OpenDocument formats for reading and saving reports, spreadsheets and presentations by January 1.

Andy Updegrove, an open source advocate and Boston lawyer, says the report rehashes old criticisms and is one-sided.

“Certainly, the ITD made some mistakes, but there were two sides to this story. Unfortunately, only one is reflected [in the report’s main findings]”, he says.

Updegrove also says that the Microsoft Office plugins the ITD is now evaluating sidestep the thorniest issues with OpenDocument for disabled computer users. “As a result, the recommendation of the committee to delay conversion until adequate accessibility tools are available is simply not necessary,” he says.

Melanie Wyne, executive director for the Initiative for Software Choice, a Washington-based advocacy group managed by the CompTIA association, says the report echoes her organisation’s point of view.

ITD “never defined what was open, they just picked a certain technology”, she said. “It’s a technology mandate by another name.”

But Will Rodger, public policy director for the Computer & Communications Industry Association, an advocacy group also based in Washington, says that OpenDocument, which was ratified by the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) in May, is the only true open standard today.

“Folks are saying we don’t want vendor lock-in from anyone,” Rodger says.

The report recommends delaying the switch to OpenDocument unless the ITD can show that disabled users won’t find their ability to access doccuments in the OpenDocument format compromised.

Sun Microsystems, one of OpenDocument’s chief backers, says it may have a solution. Last week, company officials demonstrated to ITD and disabled community activists how Microsoft Office plugins can be converted to open and save files in OpenDocument. Using Dragon’s Naturally Speaking, a popular text-to-speech software, users could listen to OpenDocument files read “flawlessly” out loud, according to Douglas Johnson, Sun’s corporate standards programme manager.

In May the ITD put out a call for plugins that could either provide a bridge between Microsoft Office and whatever application government employees use in the future, or that would allow workers to continue to use Office.

Barbara Lybarger, general counsel for the Massachusetts Office on Disability, confirmed that Sun’s plugin “performed very well. I was quite impressed.” But she says the “devil is in the details” and called for the ITD to properly test such solutions with disabled beta users.

Lybarger says that recent relations between her agency and the ITD “have been very cooperative” and that they will support moving to OpenDocument as long as it “works as well as what [disabled] users already have”.

In Denmark, ministries will continue to publish documents using HTML, Microsoft’s “.doc” format and PDF (portable document format) from Adobe Systems, says Lebech, head of the IT governance division within the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation.

Denmark’s parliament passed a motion earlier this month to encourage the use of open standards within the government, Lebech says. The government has also published a catalog of standards with some recommendations, but has not stated a preference for a document format.

“We’re taking a stand that says we want to look at each standard from a neutral viewpoint and see what are their merits to better implement parliament’s decision as best we can,” Lebech says.