State of Massachusetts goes Open format

Groklaw's Pamela Jones has this amazing news. At least it is amazing to me because the State of Massachusetts has just taken a bold, gutsy step and has decided the State is going Open Format. Out Micro$oft Office, out Lotus Notes, out Word Perfect. Since this will be a humongous task to get all departments working in the new OpenOffice environment, the deadline for all to conform will be January 1, 2007. MA Chooses OASIS OpenDoc XML as Office Standard - Requesting Comments:

This is a bit of a miracle.

The State of Massachusetts is backing OpenDocument v. 1.0 as the standard for office applications, text documents, spreadsheets, charts and graphical documents like drawings and presentations, and all agencies are expected to migrate by January 1, 2007.

Here is the new version [PDF] of their Enterprise Technical Reference Model. As they themselves acknowledge, "Given the majority of Executive Department agencies currently use office applications such as MS Office, Lotus Notes and WordPerfect that produce documents in proprietary formats, the magnitude of the migration effort to this new open standard is considerable."

Considerable, yes, but if your goal is interoperability, both necessary and worth the effort, as anyone who has ever tried to interoperate in WordPerfect with someone working in MS Office can testify. They also say when formatting doesn't matter, documents created in proprietary formats can be saved as plain text -- think email, for example -- and for documents that will primarily be accessed by a web browser through the Internet or an intranet, HTML is preferred. By HTML, they mean standard HTML, as in HTML v. 4.01. PDF is also acceptable for documents that will not be further modified, and the standard there is PDF Reference v. 1.5 that supports XML functionality.

If you wish to review where this story began, back in January, Massachusetts announced its Open Format policy (announcement transcript here), and in March many at Groklaw responded to the request for input from the public on the Commonwealth's Enterprise Technical Reference Model. We had issues. A lot of other groups had issues too. Massachusetts listened. They met with industry and other groups' representatives. You can see a list of those asked to give input at one meeting. Then they went back to the drawing board and came up with this new version. They are asking for comments once again. ...

I can well imagine the top brass at M$ trying to pressure the government into not even thinking about this move. Just remember when Steve Blamer cut short his vacation and went to meet the officials of the city of Munich, if I'm not mistaken who wanted to go completely open source for the OS running the entire government website and governmental computing infrastructure: they wanted to ditch Windoze and go Linux. Balmer, I'm sure must have been carrying a special deal in his alligator carrying case... I can't remember if Balmer went there for nothing or not though. Gee I hate these partial memory mappings... Anyway.

Which makes me think that this, in the long run, should be what big companies, trying to go too much the way of proprietary format and the like, should get. You want to grab the bedsheets all to yourself? And pull 'em all on your side? You don't want to play nice with the rest? You think making your software stand on an island and shut out competitors is a great idea? Sorry, administration bureaucracy is too big and departmental software needs to talk to each other...