Lars at the OSL

Several years ago, when helping clean out my father’s house before it was sold, I ran across an old trunk. Inside, I found hundreds of papers: the notes and articles written by my great uncle Larry Rue, a World War II war correspondent in Europe. The papers covered roughly thirty years of his career and included a personal letter from Herbert Hoover. I spent hours reading through those fascinating papers. Aside from some messy handwriting, nothing about these papers had become obsolete or unreadable.

I wish I could say the same for my own “papers.” It was 1984 when I first put a word processor on a computer. I started writing volumes. Every letter, every journal entry and every note ended up with a dot doc extension. As the years passed, I upgraded and moved my documents to new machines. By 1990, when in graduate school, I was using Word for Windows under Windows 386 (a nearly forgotten precursor to Windows 3.0). At that point, I discovered that I was no longer able to read the files that I had written only five years earlier. Another fifteen years has passed and now I can’t read my own graduate thesis document.

As their products evolved, Microsoft made conscious decisions to drop support for older document formats. The decisions were made for business or technical reasons for their own benefit and convenience, not mine. Future files formats will allegedly be patented, insuring that no matter what software reads these documents in the future, Microsoft’s corporate palm must at some time be crossed with silver.

By endorsing OpenDocument v. 1.0, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts has mandated that all government documents must be in an open format. Apparently, a state government has noticed that important documents from the past aren’t readable any more. Apparently, they also noticed that a single company could potentially put a toll booth on the discourse between citizens and their government. This is a great decision. Not only does it open the possibility that historians and archivers in the future will have access to the information, but it levels the playing field for different vendors right now. Anyone could write a document processor to read these documents. For the first time in years, perhaps we can see some real competition in the field of office document programs.

As a citizen, shouldn’t I be entitled to access the information and documents generated by my government? Isn’t this a rather basic right? No corporation should have to be paid in order for me to exercise my rights.

In the realm of my own life, I find it repugnant that a corporate toll booth could sit between me an my own journal and correspondence. I’m certainly glad nothing stood between me and my Uncle Larry. Perhaps it is just vanity, but I’d like to think that my painstakingly transcribed thoughts will someday be a found treasure. But as it stands right now, it just a bunch uselessly cryptic but beautifully organized binary files.