Submitted by Ofer Inbar on Wed, 08/02/2006 - 9:01am.
"Microsoft's surprise decision to support ODF could be in reaction to a recent government mandate in Massachussets that will require all state agencies to save documents in a vendor-neutral, standards-based format," wrote Linux News earlier this week.
Late last year, Massachusetts' Chief Technology Officer Peter Quinn tried to move Massachusetts to adopt the Open Document Format, but was forced to back down, then resign. Massachusetts appeared to buckle under to pressure from Microsoft. In an interview, Peter Quinn pointed at Bill Gavin's office as one of Microsoft's supporters in opposing the Open Document Format:
"Senator Pacheco and Secretary Galvin's office remain very heavily influenced by the Microsoft money and its lobbyist machine, as witnessed by their playbook and words, in my opinion."
In the wake of Quinn's resignation, an alliance organized to promoted the Open Document Format, and earlier this year, Massachusetts reversed again, deciding to adopt it for all 50,000 state computers. In response, Microsoft was finally forced to budge. The technology publication
The Register explained in a July article,
Microsoft is reluctantly lending its name to a project for interoperability between Office 2007 and desktop productivity software using a non-Microsoft supported file format.
[...]
The alliance was formed following the Commonwealth of Massachusetts debacle, which saw Massachusetts mandate that all state IT departments dump proprietary document file formats for standards-based offerings by 2007. In a decision that caused concern among other government users, Massachusetts subsequently reversed its decision amid much politics.
John Bonifaz was one of the leaders who responded to the debacle. This spring, Bonifaz endorsed the Open Document Format, writing,
"We should not allow Microsoft or any other corporate entity to dictate how our electronic archives are stored. These changes cannot be made overnight, but we must take practical steps to ensure the integrity and accessibility of digital public information. Use of open standards based data formats will foster government transparency and accountability, ease citizen access to public information, create greater competition for government business, improve interoperability between applications and organizations, and ensure the archival integrity of digital information."
In his
Voters' Bill of Rights, Bonifaz pledged to
Make government more accessible to all of us. Standing up to Microsoft and adopting the Open Document Format is a step in that direction.
del.icio.us
