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

Re:As a Massachusetts Resident

[aztracker1]

My own solution, use Windows Server 2003 Web Edition so I can have ASP.Net (
For me, I save more time on the *nix side of things, and don't spend too much on windows licensing. I really like Postgres better than most other RDBMS systems, it's when it comes to clustering, or distributed database deployments that other systems become easier...

How Open Is PDF?

[Caraig]

Genuine question, here. I hadn't heard anything about PDF being an open format. Granted, a lot of apps can export to PDF but when you get right down to it, isn't that ability licensed from Adobe? Probably not, but can someone explain how PDF is an open format and DOC isn't?