MN Bill Would Require Use of Open Data Formats

Andy Updegrove writes "A bill has been introduced in Minnesota that would require all Executive branch agencies to 'use open standards in situations where the other requirements of a project do not make it technically impossible to do this.' The text of the bill is focused specifically on 'open data formats.' While the amendment does not refer to open source software, the definition of 'open standards' that it contains would be conducive to open source implementations of open standards. The fact that such a bill has been introduced is significant in a number of respects. First, the debate over open formats will now be ongoing in two U.S. states rather than one. Second, if the bill is successful, the Minnesota CIO will be required to enforce a law requiring the use of open formats, rather than be forced to justify his or her authority to do so. Third, the size of the market share that can be won (or lost) depending upon a vendor's compliance with open standards will increase. And finally, if two states successfully adopt and implement open data format policies, other states will be more inclined to follow."

How government procurement works

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a lovely gesture. But ultimately I'm not sure it means a lot. This is a loophole the size of an 18-wheeler:

where the other requirements of a project do not make it technically impossible to do this

The thing is, 90% of government purchasing is steered by very, very careful tailoring of the claimed "requirements". The way government purchasing works, what this bill is very likely to do is just make it so all procurement requests are written up in such a way that it is "impossible" for a format to meet the "requirements" unless it can fully interoperate with Microsoft Word...

MECC

[ScottCooperDotNet]

Too bad Minnesota sold off MECC, the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium. [wikipedia.org] "The state of Minnesota spun off the company as a private corporation in the late 1980s. It was bought by a venture capitalist for $5 million, who sold it less than a year later to The Learning Company for $250 million."

Government assisted-funding software could again have a positive impact as MECC did. OOo, Mozilla, etc. SE Linux even...

Re:Are the standards ready?

[iabervon]

The MN bill is not specific to ODF. It would require use of some open format (i.e., one which is clearly specified and may be implemented without license restrictions) if such a format is available. Under this bill, ODF would only be required if it is, in fact, ready.

The MA situation doesn't involve legislation, but is an executive order from the IT department. The IT department is responsible for implementing the switch, and there's no reason it couldn't abandon the project if it turned out to be unworkable. They're also perfectly able to make exceptions for cases where they can't get it to work or simply don't feel like dealing (if someone had an extremely complex Word macro that they use a lot, and the ITD couldn't figure out how to do it in ODF, they could just shrug and let it go), because it's just a policy, not a law.

With respect to the maturity of ODF, it was developed by a group of organizations which, between them, are likely to have all of the needs that anyone has. For example, the Society for Biblical Literature was an active member of the technical committee. This may be a bit surprising, until you realize that they've got at least one document (a translation of the bible) in every known living language, documents in many dead languages, and things like illuminated hand-written manuscripts. Additionally, ODF was designed to include the concepts in Microsoft Office formats (based on existing converters and on inspection of the interface presented to the user).

Royalties

[Craig Ringer]

With the latest MS Office XML license, I don't think there's any chance royalties might be required. The only real remaining issue is that the license doesn't make much of a guarantee about future versions, but IIRC MS released a binding statement addressing this. I would have to go and hunt up the details now to be 100% sure. Just be aware that there's a LOT of outdated information and misconceptions about what they're doing (and they didn't help by ignoring many questions for long periods, giving roundabout answers, etc).

The only thing I'd really be worried about these days is who controls the format into the future.

Re:MECC

[BenFranske]

For those that aren't aware MECC was responsible for those memorable educational games in the late 1980s and early 90s. Most notably Number Munchers and Oregon Trail.

Re:Has ANYONE actually thought this through???

[BenFranske]

Yes, believe it or not. You obviously haven't ever read many state statues, I suggest you do, it can be both educational and entertaining. They always start off by defining terms. In this case:

"Open standards" means specifications for the encoding and transfer of computer data that:
(1) is free for all to implement and use in perpetuity, with no royalty or fee;
(2) has no restrictions on the use of data stored in the format;
(3) has no restrictions on the creation of software that stores, transmits, receives, or accesses data codified in such way;
(4) has a specification available for all to read, in a human-readable format, written in commonly accepted technical language;
(5) is documented, so that anyone can write software that can read and interpret the complete semantics of any data file stored in the data format;
(6) if it allows extensions, ensures that all extensions of the data format are themselves documented and have the other characteristics of an open data format;
(7) allows any file written in that format to be identified as adhering or not adhering to the format;
(8) if it includes any use of encryption, provides that the encryption algorithm is usable on a royalty-free, nondiscriminatory manner in perpetuity, and is documented so that anyone in possession of the appropriate encryption key or keys is able to write software to unencrypt the data.

Re:Are the standards ready?

[denttford]

Just as an aside, but the SBL isnt a religious group seeking to distribute the bible, its an very well respected academic society which publishes both books of academic interest (usually in Engligh, sometimes in German, and others) and maintains a peer journal, usually focusing on the ancient near east (not so many illuminated manuscripts, but if someone were writing on biblical translations in the middle ages, sure). That a group of historians, linguists, archeologist, sociologists, etc. might want to have a say in a document format meant to be distributable, portable, and designed to last isnt all that surprising.

Moreover, I suspect they may have more technical insight than most - LTR/RTL, printed and script, heavy diacritical use, cuneiform, IPA and other transliteration schemes, etc. are technical hurdles they've been dealing with for quite some time now in both printed and electronic format. They have even been freely distributing a Hebrew font [sbl-site.org] for years.

Just wanted to clear that up, lest people think they are a group of bible thumpers or modern monks (e-monks?).

Re:Are the standards ready?

[slide-rule]

I keep seeing these stories about governments deciding to legislate the internal usage of ODF. Is the standard really ready for prime time?

I'm far from any real expert on the format, but at my job, I have done some fairly non-trivial conversions of technical documentation (in DITA XML, if anyone cares) into ODF, and while what I'm doing is fairly rough (it's an in-house use sort of thing) the format does seem to support all the basic concepts of a word processing document... page layouts, running headers/footers, tables, frames, images, multi-column sections, bulleted and/or numbered lists, and other things I know I haven't had to worry about yet. The upshot with ODF is that it is really a zip file containing a bunch of XML files, so processing it around later is fairly easy (that is, nearly trivial when compared to a non-documented and binary *.doc file).

Re:Last time I checked..

[Anonymous Coward]

What makes \n proper?
History [wikipedia.org] says:

ASCII was developed simultaneously by the ISO and the ASA, the predecessor organization to ANSI. During the period 1963-1968, the ISO draft standards supported the use of either CR+LF or LF alone as a newline, while the ASA drafts supported only CR+LF. The Multics operating system began development in 1964 and used LF alone as its newline. Unix followed the Multics practice, and later systems followed Unix.

If it was my call I would have went with CR-LF (\r\n) too since it was supported by both ANSI and ASA

Not trying to flame or anything, just wondering.

Re:I live in MN - What is the bill numbers?

[Anonymous Coward]

S3730.0 http://www.revisor.leg.state.mn.us/bin/bldbill.php ?bill=S3730.0.html&session=ls84 [state.mn.us]

H3971.0 http://www.revisor.leg.state.mn.us/bin/bldbill.php ?bill=H3971.0.html&session=ls84 [state.mn.us]

Re:Royalties

[SgtChaireBourne]

With the latest MS Office XML license, I don't think there's any chance royalties might be required. ...

Actually, despite a lot of non-committal grunts, that's not announced yet one way or the other even for current versions of MOOX and its current licenses. Obviously MS knows the licenses are going to be scrutinized carefully so the odds of any gotchas being easy to spot are low. I'd be really careful about the wording in the license anyway. I wouldn't be surprised in the least if MOOX were dependent on something that MS would insist on royalties for.

For example, in the US, MS has thousands of sw patents. One of these is on XML serialization. If the EU decides to cut of its own economic balls so to speak and suddenly allow US-style sw patents [ffii.org], then MS won't have to hold back on litigation and will be able to sue the living daylights out of anyone using XML serialization. Note: that's anyone using XML serialization, not writing code, not developing software, simply using it is enough to warrant a letter from MS asking for royalties. So yes, technically it might be possible that the specification for MOOX could be available royalty free, but then the laundry list of patents MS has filed do require hefty royalties or concessions. MS could then sue users or opponents into oblivion and, technically, still allow MOOX 'royalty-free'.

Re:Blue-state phenomenon?

[Chode2235]

It was briefly considered a swing state, more for sensationalism then for substance. Kerry carried the state by ~4%.

True, it was closer than say 1984, but that was to be expected in a nation so equally divided by so many things (War, economic issues). Make no mistake though, MN is still very much a liberal state.

The important thing to note also that MN has a very strong tradtion of 3rd parties, and that may have figured into it as well.

http://uselectionatlas.org/USPRESIDENT/state.php?y ear=2004&fips=27&f=0