intertwingly

It’s just data

Brays, Fairness, and DoubleSpeak


Hiawatha Bray: Melanie Wyne, executive director of the Initiative for Software Choice, a coalition of computer hardware and software companies, also disapproved of Quinn’s action. Wyne said that the new policy would force the state to switch from commercial software like Microsoft Office, to free ''open source" alternatives like StarOffice, a program that automatically saves all files in the OpenDocument standard.

While journalists have a reputation for “fairness”, bloggers have a reputation for fact checking.  Time for some of the latter.

Hiawatha Bray — presumably no relation to Tim Bray whose views on truth and this subject are well known — found himself writing an article on the policy change that Massachusetts is actively considering.  It is easy to find plenty of quotes in support of this new policy, but presumably in the interest of “fairness”, Hiawatha needed to find somebody to support Microsoft’s position.

He found a willing participant in Melanie and the ISC, a group the Economist referred to as “a Microsoft-supported lobby group”.  When such potential conflicts of interest are cited, they don’t concern me so much, but it wasn’t cited in this case.

Jef Allbright goes further, and notes the way that doublespeak is employed in the US, and frankly that concerns me much more.

Melanie asserts that this policy would force the state to switch away from commercial software.  This despite the fact that the list of the list of Applications supporting OpenDocument includes both open source and commercial software.

What is true, however, is that Microsoft’s Office software is conspicuously absent from the list.  Microsoft has instead announced that they will be providing updates to Office 2000, XP, and 2003 that will support their own “immature” Microsoft Office Open Office XML format.  So much for “choice”.

As Bob Sutor so aptly put it: The irony of the statement from the Initative for Software Choice is that increased OpenDocument adoption will have the exact opposite effect of what they claim. Use of open standards is what provides fairness and equal opportunity to software developers, whether they be commercial/proprietary or open source. This is therefore better for governments and, indeed, all users of software. I would even go so far as to say that open standards are a core part of the foundation for providing true software choice, and thus increased customer and user value.

Somebody needs to point this out.  If only in the interest of “fairness”.

Update: Massachusetts’ new policy is final [via Bob Sutor]