A little while back, bywndr wrote about Massachusetts’ threat to stop using Microsoft Office because of fears that storing public documents in the suite’s proprietary file formats could lead to trouble down the road. With a bit of muscle, Massachusetts worked out a deal with Big Papa whereby Word and Excel documents were guaranteed to be available to everyone (not just MA residents) forever.

Lately, it seems that European governments have been giving Microsoft even more grief, because the company has just submitted its XML formats to Ecma International, a European standards body. With this move, all MS Office formats (not just Word and Excel) will become available. It’s not exactly open source utopia, but Microsoft’s move suggests the threat of large-scale shift to open source software has caught the attention of at least one seriously IP-obsessed corporation.

Reuters
MS Q&A

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 22nd, 2005 at 11:33 am and is filed under Reasonable. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.