Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

userbinator

The state whose official slogan is "Live Free Or Die". I'm not surprised.

Bans state agencies from using proprietary software - maybe this could include schools, in the future!

Bans state agencies from purchasing non-free software if free software exists, for a given task

...that might be going a bit too far, however.

View on HN

Looking at the bill itself[1], I don't think the short sentence summary is correct. I think the summary might actually hurt the bill, rather than help it.

What I'm seeing is things like:

"No person in the state of New Hampshire shall be required to use proprietary software for any interaction with the government,..."

I don't see anything that would, for example, ban Microsoft Word, unless it somehow became mandatory for a NH citizen to have to own it to interact with the state.

https://gencourt.state.nh.us/bill_status/legacy/bs2016/billT...

It's surprisingly common for government agencies to request that you send them Word documents or install some proprietary software.

That LibreOffice can create/edit Word documents means that particular requirement would be fine under the proposed bill. Installing proprietary software obviously wouldn't though.

It would still require that the documents open correctly in LibreOffice, no? Which might be difficult enough to ensure in practice for .docx that it would be easier for the state to mandate using ODF.

Mandating using ODF would indeed be much better, but of course that mandate doesn't prevent interop issues from occurring.

What I meant is that if there's a law that says that interop with F/OSS must be possible, it'd probably make more sense for government agencies to internally mandate the use of ODF for all outputs, than for them to test and fix every .docx that they produce for compatibility with LibreOffice. ODF might not be free from interop issues, but I'd expect the baseline to be much better.

Or PDFs that can only be used from Acrobat reader.

Pdfs open in Firefox just fine.

So I presume your emphasis is on only. Are there any features in a pdf that lock it to Adobe reader? Is anyone (govt? ) using that feature.

Some PDFs really don't work at all except in Acrobat. One example is USCIS form I-9: https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/forms/i-9...

Interesting. Does not open right in Chrome, but is opening with Firefox for me.

The I-9 form an XFA application, not something anyone sane would recognize as a proper PDF. It's all JavaScript and XML-based forms stored as opaque streams inside a PDF container and has almost nothing in common with standard PDF files beyond the container format. It works in Mozilla because Mozilla's pdf.js supports XFA as of Firefox release 91. Most PDF readers do not support XFA, which is quite reasonable considering its rarity and the fact that it has been deprecated for several years. An HTML form would have been a far better fit for this purpose.

JavaScript for form entry even though PDF already has an older form mechanism.

Lots. My wife and I are in the process of trying to become licensed as foster/adoptive parents in the state of Texas and quite a bit of the paperwork we have had to fill out will open fine in a browser, but can only be edited in Adobe Reader. I just had to fill out a form to get a new common access card to work as a federal contractor for the US DoD and it wasn't possible to save edits to the form except with Adobe Reader Pro. Even the free version of Adobe didn't work. I could read the form fine, but if I can't fill it out, I can't submit it.

A lot of this is just issues with skeuomorphism. There is little reason any of these workflows need to use pdfs at all, except that it represents a smaller feeling change from the legacy paper workflows compared to migrating to a purely web-based workflow that uses html forms instead of editable pdfs. Heck, I think I remember the FAFSA being fully html-based forms over 15 years ago when I first went to grad school, but I'm not totally sure.

If they put even a portion of the funds they would have spent into funding said free projects... I mean GnuPG is now no longer requiring or even accepting donations because of what a German city level government did to promote open source: https://lwn.net/Articles/880248/

Governments sharing and pooling their resources for open source just makes sense.

You bring up a falacy here which I see a lot.

>> "If they put even a portion of the funds they would have spent into funding said free projects"

That's not how govt, or even private, spending works. Govt spending doesn't say "hey, we saved money not buying windows, let's donate money to the Linux foundation". Assuming they save money at all (after retraining, support etc) it simply gets put back in the pot to be spent, or wasted, on the next thing.

Donating from govt funds is really hard, and is frankly just too much like hard work.

It's the same for business. We use free software all day long, but money saved there goes to lots of things, actually contributing to Open Source is an uphill battle.

Open source has figured this out, and have "support plans' a business or government can purchase.

NH's state government is one of the smallest in the union; there's no sales or income tax and only about a million people.

So what you suggest would be more viable in almost every other state in the US or EU.

I agree that that might be too far, but the one aspect of being able to audit the source code in a criminal trial makes me want this bill to pass despite that flaw. That is such a big win for justice!

> The state whose official slogan is "Live Free Or Die". I'm not surprised.

Considering they share a border with a richer more populous state with a 380-something year legacy of "step in line or GTFO" I am surprised.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com