David Coursey has written an odd and befuddled reaction to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts choosing OASIS Open Document Format. I was just settling down to answer him, trying to get into kindness mode first, when I came across Sun's Simon Phipps' blog entry, which answers Coursey better than I could. And with Simon's kind permission, I present it here. I would add this: there are a number of factual mistakes in the article, in addition to the big-picture items that Simon addresses. The one that I think matters most is this: Coursey seems to think that you can't use Open Document Format with a Microsoft computer. You can. You can download and use OpenOffice.org or StarOffice, for example, and use it on your PC with Windows. Because he doesn't realize that, he posits that it's his gut feeling that Peter Quinn is implementing some secret plot to force a change to Linux. That's silly. Well, actually, it's mean, and totally untrue. You can run OpenOffice.org on Windows, as well as on Linux or a Mac, and it's a free download, so no one will be "locked out", as he seems to imagine, or forced to change operating systems.Think of it like Firefox. It's Open Source software, but you don't have to run a GNU/Linux system to use it. You can use it with Windows or with a Mac or with Linux. Anyone can use it, no matter what operating system they are on. That is the goal in Massachusetts, to make sure everyone can have equal access, without dictating a particular product or a particular operating system. As for Coursey's suggestion that, if one must choose something other than Microsoft's Office, he thinks Adobe's PDF is a better choice, I suggest he must never have tried OpenOffice.org or he'd know there are certain kinds of documents you can create in an office suite that you can't in PDF format, and for that matter, there are certain functionalities that are missing in PDF too. OpenOffice.org, as its name suggests, provides the kinds of functionality that Microsoft's Office offers. Would he say that PDFs could replace Office, that we should all use only PDFs for all our documents? I think he needs to rethink that. He says he isn't an "ideologue", but a suggestion like that comes across like a crotchety old man determined not to try anything new at best and an ideologue at worst. If, for example, I want to create a document I know others will be editing later, is PDF a good choice? What if I want to do a presentation? Think, David. Think. But factual errors and unfair aspersions against Mr. Quinn aside, there is a bigger picture here, which is that Massachusetts is trying to ensure that our children and grandchildren and great grandchildren will still be able to open the documents we create today, even if Microsoft is no more. And that is what Simon addresses.
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