[CS-FSLUG] OpenDocument in Massachusetts: War of the Words

[Alan Trick]

On Tue, 2006-05-23 at 21:56 -0400, Don Parris wrote:
> On 5/22/06, Alan Trick <alantrick at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Mon, 2006-05-22 at 14:01 -0400, Don Parris wrote:
> > > I responded this weekend to an article by The Heartland Institute that
> > > was mostly fiction.  Here is my follow-up (which links to my initial
> > > response) comparing that report to the 1938 broadcast of War of the
> > > Worlds:
> > >
> > > http://lxer.com/module/newswire/view/61328/index.html
> > >
> > > Blessings,
> > > Don
> >
> > Wow, that's a bad article (not yours, the other one). At lease the War
> > of the Worlds was a joke, I think this guy might be serious.
> >
> > Alan Trick
> >
> 
> Titch responded today:
> http://www.fromtheheartland.org/blog/2006/05/lots_of_bluster_but_no_real_re.php#more
> 
> It's official, I'm a zealot. :-)
> 
> I ran the blog post on LXer.  You can see the comments there:
> http://lxer.com/module/newswire/view/61453/index.html
> 
> My follow-up response is coming out tomorrow or Thursday.  Probably
> tomorrow. I'm calling him a glutton for embarrassment.  Well, it's
> getting to be really entertaining. ;-)
> 
> Don

Maybe you should be a bit less sensationalist next time. Most of his
rebuttal was taking advantage of that in order to beat around the bush. 

You also might want to bring up the fact that they're are OpenDocument
plugins for MS Office and that it's quite likely that much of the Mass.
government will still be using MS Office after this switchover.

And you should let him know that open source has nothing to do with any
of this and neither does money – it's about freedom. His central point
– "that it’s bad policy to mandate open source procurement" is wrong.
                                                          QED

Alan Trick