[steve-b]

The concept that government has a responsibility to protect the taxpayers from being fleeced via vendor lockin spreads.

[WarEagle]

Government protect taxpayers from being fleeced? Surely ye jest.

Governments are in BUSINESS to fleece taxpayers.

Which alternative universe are you from?

[zeugma]

IBTGE ping.

[Mr. Jeeves]

I'm not surprised that Minnesota politicians can't even spell "XML". ;)

[softwarecreator]

Sounds to me like they are taking away the right to choose.

I can imagine the outrage on this forum if the law was changed forcing them to use only Microsoft.

[impatient]

It's about dang time.

I've argued for years that requiring commercial products to view public documents is a violation of the freedom of information act.

Micro$oft is a member of the w3c, and has been giving lip service to the concept for a while. Now that it's here, watch them tap dance.

[John 6.66=Mark of the Beast?]

The simplest open source format would be for them to use a pencil and piece of paper. Or how about a typewriter and a piece of paper.

Then you could hear if these folks are working or surfing.

[caver]

This sounds like some lawmaker got their nose out of joint about Microsoft. They probably demanded some kickback from Microsoft and MS told them no. And the lawmaker says, I show you.

[Tribune7]

The concept that government has a responsibility to protect the taxpayers from being fleeced via vendor lockin spreads.

This is about internal administrative standards not consumer choices. Why would an agency not want to takes steps to avoid becoming dependent on a single vendor?

[Beckwith]

I retired in 2001 after designing and building some of the largest data architectures, databases and data warehouses in the world (NASA, Space Station Program, US Army Readiness and Sustainability and many others of that scale).

I can absolutely guarantee that this initiative will fail and it has nothing to do with standards.

Organizational, cultural and personal agendas will guarantee the standard will never be physically implemented, no matter how many laws, rules, standards or whatever these geniuses produce.

Add to that the influence of Minnesota's vendors. They don't give a hoot about your standards. They'll find 42,000 reasons to ignore them. They're pushing product and that takes place on the golf course, not the conference room.

And you can take that to the bank.

[Calpernia]

ping

[MarkL]

Does anyone else here remember GOSIP (or was is GOSSIP?), where the federal government decided that they needed to run their networks using the ISO networking protocols? To the best of my knowledge, the only company that actually implemented most of the ISO protocols was DEC, with their DECNET Level 3.

I remember fielding a call once from a guy who needed X to run over the ISO protocols, and I kept trying to tell him that to the best of my knowledge, the only way he'd ever get that to happen was for him to write the protocols himself, since X is an open protocol, but it runs on the DOD protocols (TCP/IP).

I wonder how many gazillions of dollars were wasted on that boondoggle. Heck, I believe that the programs were cancelled before the final specifications were released!

Mark