The Boston Tea Party of 2005

The State of Massachusetts recently adopted the OpenDocument Format (ODF) setting a landmark precedent to support open standards for all document exchange between the state and its customers — businesses, citizens and other government entities. This decision signals a big win for open source software (OSS) and open standards adoption in government.

No taxation without representation

The decision by the modern state recalls the signature event of an earlier Massachusetts: the Boston Tea Party of 1773 where American “Sons of Liberty”, dressed up as Mohawk Indians, jumped onto British East India Company ships and dumped 45 tons of tea into the Boston harbor to protest King George III’s increase in taxation on the American colonies. Throwing overboard proprietary document formats is the equivalent message to the kings of today’s software industry that the right to freedom and open standards for documents and data is worth fighting for. What Massachusetts has done may be more effective in practice than all of the anti-trust activity to date of the US Department of Justice (DOJ).

“What Massachusetts has done may be more effective in practice than all of the anti-trust activity to date of the US Department of Justice.”

Setting a precedent

Peter Quinn, CIO of the State of Massachusetts (and evidently chief Mohawk), has set the bar high. Mandating the clean XML ODF instead of Microsoft’s XML format has the potential to percolate through all the US state governments and even the federal government. The Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) was instrumental in preparing the ODF and companies such as IBM, Sun, and Adobe were part of this team. ODF is the next generation of HTML and XML and is in the process of being ratified by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Companies such as IBM, Sun, Adobe and Google are now working on consolidating the ODF to handle XForms and metadata. Massachusetts will start using ODF compatible office automation applications for word processing, spreadsheets, and presentation graphics by January 1, 2007. A plan to ensure conformance to ODF and migrate all current documents, train staff and standardize desktops will be implemented. All new applications will have to support ODF natively from 2007 onwards.

So what does this standard buy for the state? Assured interoperability, content flexibility, and easier content management. These benefits lead to improved IT services and to better citizen services and governance. In recognizing these benefits, the Australian government has cited the Massachusetts precedent and will mandate the use of ODF to help provide its citizens greater access to information.

“Discard vendor lock-in and adopt the Massachusetts bill of rights for open document standards.”

Applications such as OpenOffice.org, StarOffice, KOffice, Scribus, IBM Workplace support, or will soon support, ODF. Microsoft’s office products do not directly handle ODF but the company has 18 months to add the support required. Even though Microsoft has sponsored OASIS, it has ironically created proprietary extensions to standard XML for audio, video, GIS and voice. Microsoft could realize tremendous good-will by contributing its extensions back to the open standards so that the ODF improves for everyone. This would be a “win-win” for all customers who would then be able to use open standards for interoperability across open source and proprietary products.

Then again, King George didn’t understand the benefits of lower taxes or less “lock-in” either. But King George would be well advised that any government across the world desiring better governance through freedom, transparency and openness in providing data and public information to their citizens will now have a clear precedent to discard colonial vendor lock-in and adopt the Massachusetts bill of rights for open document standards.

A call to all developing nations is in order: Take note of the benefits of mandatory open standards for all IT automation infrastructure. Open standards will improve governance and help provide citizen services fairly and transparently.