Dan Bricklin has put up a blog entry with his thoughts on the MA ODF meeting along with 3 audio files containing a total of almost 4 hours audio for the meeting.

From Groklaw – a blog of notes from the Massachusetts ODF Meeting where some pollies registered some displeasure of having not been involved, and sounded like they’d been reading too much misinformation from Microsoft. 🙁

There does appear to be at least one valid issue, and that is disability access, though sadly I’ve not seen details of what this exact problem is. Personally I would thought that to be an implementation issue rather than a document format issue, so I’m probably missing something there because Andy writes:

The disability issues are real, and the ITD seems to have been caught off guard on this. They should have been all over this issue a year ago, but seem to be going in the right direction now. Still, a bad tactical — and ethicall — mistake.
(sic)

These two quotes in particular from Andy’s blog are quite telling:

Senator Pacheco doesn’t understand the difference between open source and open standards (and certainly doesn’t understand the difference between OpenDocument and OpenOffice). More than once, he indicated that he thought that the policy would require the Executive Agencies to use OpenOffice, not realizing that there are other compliant alternatives.

The hearing was stacked against the positive, in that although Quinn and ITD General Counsel Linda Hamel were given plenty of opportunity to speak and answer questions, no one else who was in favor of the new policy was permitted to give testimony (I know of at least one major, supporting vendor that tried and was refused), nor were any questions from the audience allowed.

Update: Scanning through Andy’s real-time notes shows another interesting little factoid:

the new policy applies only to the Executive Agencies. It does not apply to the Judiciary, although the Judiciary is actually way ahead of us, with over 2000 desktops already ODF enabled.

So James has written a very enthusiastic & spot on piece about Annodex, the open source technology from CSIRO that allows you to annotate and index multimedia files (using patent and royalty free codecs, though legacy non-free ones like MPEG-1 are usable in the short term).

I was lucky enough to be at both the presentation and fixit session for Annodex at LCA 2004 and have to say it sounded like an excellent technology, one that is long overdue and badly needed.

The ability to hyperlink into a given time range of a media file and then have just that segment sent to you (rather than having to get everything up to that range, or even worse, the entire file) is, I believe, perhaps its strongest feature.

I made a heap of notes in the presentation, but they’re at work and I’m not, so I can’t make any more comments about what occurred to me about it’s other possible uses..

If it wasn’t bad enough that Microsoft had a patent granted on Apple’s wheel thingy on the iPod after the iPod was on the market now a company in the US is claiming to have patents that cover XML for the transfer of “data in neutral forms”.

The ray of light is that there is a good chance that the patent could be ruled unenforceable in a court of law, as the report points out:

Patent lawyer Bruce Sunstein, a co-founder of Boston-based Bromberg & Sunstein, viewed Scientigo’s patents and concluded that the company will have difficulty in enforcing claims over XML.

Sunstein noted that XML is derived from SGML, which dates back to the 1980s. SGML, in turn, is based on computing concepts from the 1960s. If Scientigo’s claims were ever litigated, the company would have to address all the prior work on data formats.

Update: Groklaw now has a report on these patent claims.

Thanks Ben for letting me know that user registrations were broken here, I think it was because I slipped up with migrating the database permissions over to the Xen system.. Should be fixed now!

Update: Spoke too soon – try again tomorrow.. 🙁