The Massachusetts Office Party

Quattro Vezina writes "The Inquirer reports that the state of Massachusetts has performed a modern-day Boston Tea Party, by dumping Microsoft Office in the proverbial ocean. According to the article, 'every state document must be in PDF or using Open Office formats' starting in 2007." Forbes has the story as well. More from the article: "The switch to open formats such as these was needed to ensure that the state could guarantee that citizens could open and read electronic documents in the future, according to Massachusetts - something that was not possible using closed formats. The proposal, which is open for comment until the end of next week before it takes effect, would represent a big boost for open source software such as Open Office, which is created by volunteer programmers and made available free of charge."

Comments

Always explaining

[ShatteredDream]

Anyone else get sick and tired of the media always explaining and reexplaining things like what open source means to the public? I've seen things as common sense as "programming language" defined for the public. Anyone who cannot figure out what most of these things mean by now is willfully ignorant or too stupid to be worried about.

I guess it's just an easy way for them to fill up space to get closer to their 750 word limit.