New York State solicits comments on archiving of digital documents
Slashdot reports that New York State is soliciting comments on archiving of digital documents.
Slashdot predictably see this as an opportunity to further the cause of ODF versus OOXML. While some people get excited about this issue, I do not, I am far more interested in people writing open source code than using it. In fact I dislike the idea of ordering people to use a particular type of software unless there is a really good reason for it. Petty industry politics is not a good reason. Let users choose the best tool to do their job. Trying to win arguments by legislative fiat is a Lennist strategy that open source advocates should reject.
I don't beleive the silly notion that civilization will everl lose the capability to read Word files of whatever vintage. If we can decode Linear B and Egyptian Hieroglyphs we can decode any document format that contains data we actually care about. Wittgenstein once remarked that 'usage creates meaning', the same is true of interpretation. Encode a million documents in an obscure format and it will be worth someone's while to maintain the ability to decode them.
More interesting to my eye was the complete lack of security considerations in the New York State questionaire. At a time when Emergent Chaos seems to be posting daily reports of major government data breaches involving millions of people security should be a major concern.
Its not just confidentiality that is at issue however. Authenticity and provenance matter, particularly when documents are stored for long periods of time. The ability to modify the past can affect the present. For example a company that took out a 50 year lease on a state property in 1970 decides that they would like to continue to have the use of it. So they bribe an archivist to modify the digital record of the original lease to give them a 150 year lease at the old rate instead. Without integrity controls the digital archive cannot replace paper records.
We have the tools to address these issues but we have to have the foresight to apply them.
