Massachusetts set to switch off Microsoft

[Massachusetts] said on Wednesday that all electronic documents “created and saved” by state employees would have to be based on open formats, with the switch to start at the beginning of 2007.

Documents created using Microsoft’s Office software are produced in formats that are controlled by the Microsoft, making them inelligible. In a paper laying out its future technology strategy on Wednesday, the state also specified only two document types that could be used in the future – OpenDocument, which is used in open source applications like Open Office, and PDF, a widely used standard for electronic documents.

The switch to open formats like these was needed to ensure that the state could guarantee that citizens could open and read electronic documents in the future, according to the state – something that was not possible using closed formats.

State may drop Office software

Microsoft and other companies could keep doing business with the state government by adding OpenDocument as a standard file format. The upcoming version of Microsoft Office, due next year, will use a file format based on the open XML document standard, which is similar to OpenDocument.

But Alan Yates, general manager of Microsoft’s information worker business strategy unit, indicated in an e-mailed statement that the company isn’t interested in adopting the full OpenDocument standard.

Microsoft must drop its Office politics

Microsoft is deeply hurt by this ingratitude. Why not use its open standard, it asks? Why force a downgrade on interoperability and functionality on users, when sticking to the MS way would be so easy and work so well? In return, it is fair to ask whether the MS open standard really is open and can be freely used by anyone without encumbrance. Can it be included in GPL software, for example? Microsoft says it’s not for it to comment on other people’s licences — a curious stance for a company usually more than ready to talk at length about the legal and practical issues of open development.

Does OpenDocument, which is the result of a lot of hard work from people fully versed in contemporary corporate computing, really fail at the very things it was designed to provide? Microsoft had every chance to contribute to the standard during its development — wasn’t that the time for good corporate citizens to raise such issues? And what happened to the customer is always right?

U.S. state plans to abandon Microsoft Office

While a number of government agencies across the world have expressed plans to drop Microsoft products in favor of open-source and open-standard technologies, Massachusetts is the first major public-sector institution to do so in the U.S. Other noteworthy instances in which Microsoft software is being replaced by open-source technology include the adoption of Linux in the cities of Munich, Germany; Bergen, Norway; and Vienna.