Michael Dolan Dot Com

Friday, September 23rd, 2005

Massachusetts Approves OpenDocument Plan

Finally, the first state to officially mandate all documents must conform to OpenDocument standards - a huge win for open source and open standards.

“The Commonwealth’s decision is a watershed event for the adoption of open standards,” said Bob Sutor, IBM’s vice president of standards on Friday. “Massachusetts residents, rather than any one vendor, now control their own information.”

This should pave the way for others going forward and I’m glad to see the world opening up to investigating just what the legal rights are within their own files. I’m sure we’ll see more activity out of Europe but I’d like to see more U.S. companies pushing OpenDocument. Some day MSFT may just have to adapt Office to support it. Didn’t they say something recently about “we’ve listened to our customers and we’ve changed”??