Email Comment: Support for Open Standards

[OMBPublicComments]

[Email Comment, received on 4/17/2016, at 10:25PM ET]

I am very glad to see the Federal Government thinking seriously about Open Source Software. That issue is important for the future functionality of our society and for cost reduction, yet it has not received the attention that it deserves. I have 2 general suggestions.

First, my background- I am a retired (still professionally active) University of Michigan Professor, and I have used digital information in my teaching and research since the late 1980s, i.e., very early in the game, so I have witnessed what happens as proprietary software companies push their interests or drop support and even disappear altogether.

First, I would urge that all government workforms and data (e.g., documents, images, etc.) be in Open Source Software and preferably open format (nonproprietary). This gives full ownership of the digital work to our government, allows easy change of software programs to access the information and is less likely leave the government with inaccessible information when a proprietary software venders decide to cease support. This often true for specialized hardware, e.g., medical and other devices that produce digital data and for specialized digital-data-processing programs. I would cite text document file format as an important but little known example. There is an international standard text file format called open data text (.odt) that should be more widely used It is a better format for longterm archiving, it is totally nonproprietary and very efficient, e.g., much smaller file size than Microsoft's .doc or .docx. Many obfuscations and interferences have been “cooked up” to slow the advent of open data text and other standardized workforms, but hopefully, these will progress into more widespread use even without being pushed by sales forces.

Second, it should be recognized that established software vendors, particularly Microsoft, have interfered with the advent of standardized, open-format, cross-platform-compatible software. Public knowledge of these activities is very limited and many deny that this interference could occur; however, there is clear public record. After Microsoft sabotaged the early dominant web browser Netscape (out of court settlement for ca. $400M) in order to make their new Internet Explorer dominant, they tried to implement their own nonstandard version of html, but that including their program Frontpage are largely gone. Imagine what a “balkanized” Worldwide Web would be. There are many iterations of these behaviors involving Microsoft.

Sincerely,
Larry D. Noodén, Professor Emeritus
Biology- EEB/MCDB
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1048