OpenDocument standard reaches state government

[jc at trillian.mit.edu (John Chambers)]

Adam Russell writes:
| I don't think that the idea of open standards for documents is anything
| newer than a few decades or so.

True, but that's because until the 1980's,  most  documents
(government  and  otherwise) were in what we now call "hard
copy" form, and those have always been "open" in the  sense
we're  talking about.  Unless you were blind, the documents
were accessible to you, and you  didn't  need  any  special
hardware to read them.

Granted, there was a lot of data in  computers  before  the
80's.   But  that data was rarely documents.  It was mostly
numeric "database" information.  Things called  "documents"
were kept in hard-copy form until recently.

One semi-exception to this was microfilm.  But  with  that,
you could easily get a machine from many sources to display
a document.  Government offices  normally  had  (and  still
have)  micofilm  readers, and they can usually make printed
copies.  Microfilm is a photographic format,  and  all  you
really  need  is  magnification.  A document isn't encoded;
it's merely shrunk.

What's new since the 80's is that  we  now  have  documents
that  are  in  effect  encrypted by being stored in digital
form, in formats that are unreadable by the human eye.   We
can't   read   them   without  using  equipment  (software)
purchased from the owner of the  data  format,  or  from  a
company that is licensed to handle the format.  But dealing
with the government often means that we have to read  those
documents.   So we have to pay the format's owner to merely
read something that used to be openly readable.

This is really something new.  Never before had  government
documents  been  held  unreadable  in  a  format  that  was
accessible only by going through a  private  owner  of  the
format.

It's interesting that governments  are  waking  up  to  the
problems  so  quickly.  I mean, how often does a government
agency correct a mistake within mere decades?  And all that
they're  doing, really, is saying that government documents
must be readable by people affected by them.   You'd  think
this would be a no-brainer.

(Of course, there's the observation that until a century or
two back, most people in most of the world were illiterate,
so "open" documents didn't help them much.  ;-)