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Massachusetts Adopting 'Open Format' Software

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the file-formats-rule-the-world dept.

XopherMV writes "A Massachusetts state senator who had complained about the state government's effort to promote open-source software at the expense of proprietary software has hailed the state's effort to reach a compromise over future software purchases by the state. The latest iteration of the state's policy emphasizes 'Open Formats' such as TXT, RTF, HTM, PDF, and XML." And if file formats for state use must be in truly open and free formats, then it matters much less what OS or application is used to create or open them. (On the other hand, XML and other TLAs don't always mean free or open formats.)

4 of 273 comments (clear)

  1. Re:PDF by TheRaven64 · · Score: 5, Informative

    PDF is an open format. The specifications are available for free download and no license fee is required to implement it. It is controlled by a single entity (Adobe), rather than by a committee (e.g. the w3c), but it is no less open.

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    I am TheRaven on Soylent News
  2. HTM? HTM? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    HTM is the filename suffix that broken operating systems like Windows used to assign to HTML files. The document format is called HTML.

  3. Re:True, but... by theguyfromsaturn · · Score: 5, Informative

    You must be using extremely simple documents... basically plain text. My supervisor and his other grad students use different versions of Word (I'm not sure which one), but all the the figure positions, get screwed up, equations get put everywhere, and it's a general mess. I manage to maintain compatibily with both of those guys by not using Word but OpenOffice instead. It's actually this lack of compatibility between Word versions that got one of the other grad students to switch to OpenOffice, which was better at handling different versions of Word documents than Word itself.

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    I like my dinosaurs feathery, and my pterosaurs hairy (or is it pycnofibery?)
  4. TXT is not a format by Free+Bird · · Score: 5, Informative

    A .TXT file is nothing more and nothing less than a plain text file. Ironically, it's only because of MS, champion of closed standards, that using the .TXT extension for these files has now become a de facto convention, but in the DOS age, other extensions such as .DOC or extensions that were basically part of the name (like README.1ST) or the total absence of an extension were also very common.