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So Hiawatha Bray's at it again in the Saturday issue of the Globe, talking about the evil movement toward OpenDocument on Beacon Hill. It's amazing that this man managed to write a quite good article earlier in the week, one which raised a privacy-rights issue in a relatively balanced way: the one about serial-number encoding in hardcopies produced by off-the-shelf color laser printers. (In fact I had not heard of this until Bray's article.) He even pointed out my favorite argument against intrusive technology: we might think highly of our own police and our own so-called activist judges, but in other countries where this and other covert American technology is adopted, such police and judicial power can be used to violently throttle all forms of dissidence. Anyway--I just don't see how Bray gets off on this tangent about how OpenDocument is a Romney initiative. Why would we in the open-software movement want to prop up Romney by sharing the credit/blame for a relatively innocuous standards initiative designed to benefit future generations of individuals who want to comb through online warehouses of old government documents? The politics of this stinks. I understand the concerns of the disability-rights activists who rightly point out that the costly R&D efforts put in by Microsoft and its ilk to (grudgingly) make MS Office software more user-friendly to visually-handicapped people have yet to be replicated in fully by the free-software contributors to OpenDocument. But this is a long-term strategy designed to open up Microsoft's file-format standards. Bray's approach undermines this strategy by causing people like me to question whether we would want to lend our support to anything promoted by theocrats like Romney. Ugh. -rich
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