One government worker sending a document to another government worker should not involve a proprietary, for-profit data format.
With a hardcopy paper document this would obviously be unacceptable, but since digitization and software eating the world, we pay our fees to Microsoft and go about our merry way.
I'm middle-aged and tired, I'm not going to fight this fight anymore. Maybe some day legislators will grow fangs and start giving a shit about strategic interoperability. Probably not.
For that very reason, Microsoft turned the Office formats into open standards:
https://ecma-international.org/publications-and-standards/st...
https://www.iso.org/standard/71691.html
Well, at least nominally. The real standard is still Microsoft’s implementation.
That that standard has several thousand pages and internal inconsistencies, ... well
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Op...
Not so long as their paychecks require them to not have fangs.
If you're saying that we've reached a point of maturity in everyday digital paperwork documents that we can formally standardize some and move away from vendor innovation, you may be right, but the transition is a matter of timing and discussion because of the tradeoffs involved when that happens, not a rhetorical principle.
Microsoft Office documents haven't been proprietary for a long time. The formats are publicly-documented and Microsoft maintains open-source libraries that read/write them.
They're all XML-based and unobfuscated (beyond their convoluted design).
There are also many FOSS applications, including LibreOffice, that are perfectly fine as replacements for Microsoft Office.
Proprietary formats are a problem, but not with Microsoft Office anymore.
We should all be a lot more annoyed by PDFs, honestly.
From my own experience dealing with MS Office-based government organizations, this is absolutely false. Sure, LibreOffice can read and write DOCX, XLSX, and PPTX files that are nominally interoperable with MS Office. But more often than not, MS Office mangles the formatting of LibreOffice-generated files. For example, text sizes, fonts, and element alignments in PPTX files get thrown off noticeably.
As another reply mentions, there's this nominal open-source standard. But the de facto standard is the MS Office implementation. I have to use MS Office instead of LibreOffice to eliminate the risk of document mangling when I send files over to the government people in charnge of my funding.
The tech market makes progress through booms and busts, hype cycles, and bankruptcies. The government can't afford that, and it should not.
The taxpayers deserve the most efficient use of their tax dollars, and that's not through in-house tech.
The best you can probably get is public support for open source companies and open source products.
2. I consider myself a limited government proponent, but even if government were cut down to the bone, there is still a need for the government to maintain in-house software. Just imagine the internal software that the military and the IRS has, for example. The Library of Congress probably has very interesting software for helping manage its collection. It is conceivable for the federal government to build and maintain office software to aid its operations.
But as a taxpayer, I’d be very open to those salaries IF government IT was overhauled and run like a competent and agile tech startup, unencumbered by politics and red tape - at least to bootstrap some initital momentum.
Longer term, we need something like a “Tech Corps”, akin to a branch of the military, where new recruits are trained in tech bootcamps, and then deployed to one of the thousands of government departments that require resources for their projects/processes. Ideally, these roles should be viewed as an honorable monastic vocation, not a bureaucratic or political career.
> “committed to secure by design and secure by default.”
> “As an industry leader we must be accountable for the security of our products and services.”
Wow, that sure is a lot of commitment and accountability! I'm not seeing much in the way of consequences for failing to meet those commitments though, and obviously there is absolutely no accountability. What's the value of a commitment that you can just fail to meet with impunity again?
This almost reads like all those tech company CEOs taking full responsibility for layoffs last year.
It isn't that Microsoft does not care at all about security it is just that they see it as some business that they can/must make 40-50% margin on like the rest of their operations.[aka outsource it all to countries where folks have fake credentials]
Isn’t that how it works? Not saying it should but that it does.
A whole lot of the economy is given a “free pass” because it keeps people from investigating government agents behavior and demanding change
The elders are trying to keep what they know alive as that as enriched them. This is just a generational Ponzi scheme. It’s all a bunch of 70+ year old racists and poorly educated post war, Cold War paranoids who huffed leaded gas fumes know; run hustles, cons, and protection rackets.
I mean, of course they were, but it's definitely a weird situation.
On Microsoft, the U.S. Government Must Embrace the Stick
It is government directed capitalism, just like other global superpowers like China.
