Another desperate attempt to discredit Massachusetts OpenDocument adoption
It was on the front page of the Boston Globe newspaper today, and the lead article on their web site—an investigation that normally would be buried in the City & Region section of the paper.
Context & Ripple Effects
The immediate backdrop is Massachusetts' decision to adopt OpenDocument as a state standard, a move already contentious enough that a Boston Globe investigation into it could lead the paper on 2005-11-27. O'Reilly Network's post objects less to the reporting than to its placement, arguing the piece would ordinarily have been buried in City & Region.
With no other outlets picking up the story the same day, the fight over the state's format mandate is at this moment being waged largely through framing: the Globe reaches a general readership, while the open-source community responds through specialist channels.
First-order effects
- Front-page placement carries the OpenDocument debate beyond the trade press, meaning Massachusetts officials defending the mandate must now answer to a mainstream audience rather than a technical one.
- The Globe's characterization of the adoption as worth investigating hands critics of the policy a credible, citable mainstream source they previously lacked.
Second-order effects
- Both vendors and open-standards advocates gain a reason to court mainstream press narratives, since a single front-page story shapes voter perception more than any standards-body filing.
- Other state governments weighing OpenDocument-style mandates face a raised political bar: adoption now invites the kind of scrutiny that made Massachusetts' decision a newspaper lead.
Third-order effects
- If major dailies keep treating state file-format decisions as investigative targets, government open-standards procurement becomes a recurring political story rather than a technical one, and the cost of adopting open formats rises accordingly.
- Whether the pattern holds depends on whether follow-up coverage sustains the frame or the story recedes once the mandate takes effect — the corpus here shows only the opening move.
The trend: In late 2005, government open-document mandates are turning into contested public-narrative battles, with mainstream press framing increasingly decisive for their political viability.