The Commonwealth of Massachusetts’s decision to mandate OpenDocument has incurred the wrath of Microsoft’s hydra, the three-headed beast known as Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. Won’t Redmond ever learn that hubris is not a sales strategy?
On September 21 of this year, The Commonwealth of Massachusetts’s Information Technology Division (ITD) released its long-awaited Enterprise Technical Reference Model, Version 3.5 (ETR), which mandates the use of the Open Document Format or OpenDocument for the storage of all office (text document, spreadsheet, and presentation) files. As the ETR points out:
The OASIS Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument)is a standardized, XML- based file format specification suitable for office applications. It covers the features required by text, spreadsheets, charts, and graphical documents. The specification was recently approved by OASIS as an open standard. OASIS has also submitted the standard to ISO for consideration as an international standard for office document formats.[ To see the entire ETR, see http://www.linux-mag.com/redirect/2005-12/docket/.]
The Commonwealth of Massachusetts, having given this a lot of thought and time, concluded that it was critical to state government that state records not be retained in a file format that’s controlled by a single vendor. There are a lot of good arguments for this decision, not the least of which is the risk to the state of losing control of or access to their documents.
Through OASIS, a number of competing companies, including IBM, Sun, and Adobe, came together and agreed that they could live with a shared document format, OpenDocument. Moreover, the companies decided that, to the extent any adopter of OpenDocument held patents, such patents would be licensed royalty-free under the standard. Sun has subsequently made an…
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