Peter Quinn

Why did the administration in Massachusetts seek to adopt OpenDocument Format?

For us, it was a simple equation. It’s about keeping public documents free and unencumbered not only today but for future generations. If it’s in an open format, fully documented and unencumbered by a license, you can do something with it. If it’s patented then it’s beholden to somebody else. Government’s responsibility is to keep its information open and unimpeded, not only today but also tomorrow.

What resistance did you get and from whom?

Microsoft was clearly against it. The accessibility community was against it. There was criticism we didn’t reach out enough, which was fair. Some legislators weighed in and objected to it.

Microsoft was going to change some of what they were doing. Microsoft allowed their XML documents to be opened by any reader. But that doesn’t get us where we need to go.

Any changes we agreed to they wanted to do for Massachusetts only. We wanted the whole world to have it. We’re a government community, and at the end of the day we’re one IT community.

What did state legislators have to say about the open standard?

State Senator Michael Morrissey doesn’t know me from a hole in the wall, and doesn’t know much about IT. He filed the amendment that essentially guts the office of the CIO, and its ability to set standards and procurement. It hasn’t passed yet.

If you sat through any of the testimony, especially at informational hearings, legislators just truly do not understand the importance of having a standard in terms of history. We have no digital archives in the state. History is being created at an unprecedented rate, and lost at unprecedented rate.

We were of the mindset that this was the correct thing to do for the public, for government, and for future generations. I never thought people would make this personal, which they clearly did. All of a sudden I became a lightning rod for everything that is IT.

Why were you so scary?

There’s no other way to say this: The near-monopoly in the commonwealth in terms of desktop software is Microsoft. They have an excellent lobbying organization. I have to give Microsoft credit for its ability to lobby and influence.

It’s in the political arena now. You have to understand there are people who will make political hay over anything. Back up to when we first announced open standards, along with open source. The insinuation was we were going to rape and pillage the entire software industry and socialize it all. Of course that didn’t happen.

Technically, what does it take for a government to go to an open standard?

We’re not saying wake up tomorrow and redo the world. The reality is we all refresh our technology from an infrastructure standpoint every three to five years. Each time you do something, pull in the open standards as you go.

People need to understand what is happening in the desktop environment in particular. Everyone’s moving to systems-oriented architecture and Web-based services. The desktop of the future looks like a very substantive browser, with robust e-mail, calendaring and readers. If you need a software suite, why would you buy one when you can get one for nothing with most of functionality you need?

Microsoft has said that Massachusetts was out to penalize their products. Are they right?

Absolutely not. The state came up with a standard, not a procurement policy. It’s entirely up to them whether they choose to support the standard or not. It’s no different from standards set in the home-building or any other industry. It’s their decision not to do it.

This is not an anti-Microsoft decision. If it was, we wouldn’t have engaged them in all the conversations — and by the way, conversations three to four weeks before we went out for comment telling them what we were going to do.

Very quietly, one on one, we asked them to support it. It’s not like they weren’t part of the conversation, not like there was a surprise here that some folks have alluded to. They’ve taken part hand-to-hand in this journey. We wanted them to be part of the solution. It was their decision not to be.

Alan Yates

What’s Microsoft’s problem with the OpenDocument Format proposed in Massachusetts?

The point is many different formats are needed to acquire digital preservation, not just one. Narrowing the debate to one format doesn’t address real-world issues. Documents come in many different formats, and there are many different types of communications other than documents.

They are choosing one format for documents when there are multiple formats for documents. They did approve two, .pdf and .odf. They excluded four, five, six, seven (for example, .html, .rtf, .doc, .docx, .txt). It wasn’t clear why certain things are included and others excluded when the goal is to preserve digital information of any kind.

This is an area of innovation — XML-based document formats. They jumped in and presupposed what the market conclusion would be, rather than it being a market-driven standard. Competition among these technologies serves the customer better. Customers need to have choice for formats, to communicate with citizens and store records.

Could Microsoft conform to the OpenDocument Format if it chose to?

Microsoft is not designed to output this format. The policy is very explicitly to exclude Microsoft technology.

Right now formats reflect products. Microsoft Office is more powerful than OpenOffice [an open-source software product]. There’s lots lost from changing Office, the product, to OpenDocument Format. It puts our products at an unnecessary technical disadvantage.

If you ask Eric Kriss, the former administration and finance secretary, or Peter Quinn, they’ve said it wasn’t an anti-Microsoft move. In effect, the policy clearly affects Microsoft’s Office products in a negative way and OpenOffice in a positive way, so what conclusion can be drawn?

There are so many different types of communication and documents — instant message, e-mail — in multiple format types. Within e-mail there are photos, voice, video. Within spreadsheets, there are charts and graphs. You can embed any type of media, that’s precisely our point. Choosing one document format is unwise.

What is Microsoft doing with its XML standard now?

Microsoft, for our part, has taken our technology to an organization called ECMA International. It’s been around for 20 years. It has a great track record working across different industries. The people participating in the committee are from Apple, Intel, Toshiba and the British Library. There’s a broad range of input into the standard. We intend for it to become a worldwide standard. As we move to XML, there’s an enormous amount of innovation that can be released.

Both ODF and open XML use XML in different ways. We’re not criticizing ODF. We’re simply saying the issue is more complicated than one standard. Many different alternatives should be available.

The big difference between the approach of the ODF Alliance [a business group] and Microsoft’s approach is the alliance wants to mandate ODF as a single document format. Microsoft is promoting acceptance of all relevant document standards. It makes little sense to preclude important options embedded in billions of existing documents today.

How do you view the growing move toward open-source software?

Governments don’t want to become a technology provider themselves. They want to focus on government services with technology available to help them do that.

There’s only one cost savings with open-source software — the acquisition cost. Typically, in order to really rely on open-source software, you have to consider acquisition costs, maintenance, skills and training of the customer, integration costs to make it work within existing systems and opportunity costs for innovation they may or may not be losing out on.

Microsoft puts emphasis on software development so that it just works. It plugs together. The services you need, you can get from a wide variety of industry players that are trained to support it.

Microsoft supports a number of different open-source software projects. We license our technology under a variety of different licenses. Microsoft is trying to take a balanced approach and not a religious approach.

Our focus is on adding value through software, not creating a dependency for ongoing consulting services.