ongoing · New England Town Meeting
Someone sent Tim Bray the notes from a New England Town Meeting about Open Documents. In case you didn’t hear, the state of Massachusetts has drafted a proposal to use the Open Document Format over Microsoft Office.
My favorite snippet:
MSFT: This appears to be an assault on the intellectual property of the private sector.
Kriss: Sovereignty trumps intellectual property. Companies certainly have the right to own their own intellectual property. We’re all for IP in implementations, just not in interchange formats.
As you probably have guessed, I support the state of Massachusetts. Content, particularly content in the public sector, needs to be open so anyone can read it. If they write their documents in Office XP and I have Office 95 — oops, sorry, I can’t read it. But if it’s in an XML-based format, I would have a chance to read it, especially since the readers are free.
September 23rd, 2005 at 5:20 am
If you have Office 95, can you read anything?
September 23rd, 2005 at 6:41 am
Actually, I know people who have upgraded their PC’s and had Office ‘95 on their old machine, decided that it worked well enough, so they have installed it on their new one. Because why should they spend money to get something new when the old one is fine?
This story just fasinates me, because a major body has decided that they want their content to be readable by everyone — not just people who have paid the Microsoft Tax (or IBM Tax or Sun Tax, etc.)