Massachusetts Explains Legal Concerns for Open Documents

Tontoman writes "ZDNet is running a story that sheds new light on the decision by Massachusetts to switch to open formats for the commonwealth's official documents. This issue has previously been discussed on Slashdot, first The Massachusetts Office Party and then Microsoft Lashes out at Massachusetts IT Decision . From the article: 'Eric Kriss, Secretary of Administration & Finance for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, told CRN on Friday that Massachusetts had concerns about the openness of Microsoft XML schemas as well as with potential patent issues that could arise in the future.' The article also quotes a Microsoft executive on further reason that Microsoft's upcoming Office 12 will not support OpenDocument."

Comments

Re:MS reply

[Dachannien]

The folks at Redmond must have special paper that lets you print video and audio.

Re:It could be useful

[Lemmy Caution]

"consensuated"

What the hell kind of word is that?

Do you mean "created by consensus?" "Consensual?" Those are words.

Gack. Verbing weirds language.

Re:It could be useful

[tessonec]

Well, it was funny indeed. The mistake is due to the fact that there is a verb: "consensuar" in Spanish. I meant to create by consensus.

Re:MS reply

[pglee]

It's worth remembering that a camel is a horse designed by a committee :)

Re:Format converter

[HermanAB]

I think the converter already exists and is called OpenOffice.org - works quite well really...

Re:MS reply

[Carcass666]

Microsoft said that Massachusetts decision is wrong because open document formats do not allow embedded video or audio in the document.

The Microsoft rep went on to say that they would be discontinuing support for import/export of ASCII and WordPerfect document formats, to the delight of many professional communities.

Re:It could be useful

[jcnnghm]

Have you ever seen Word "HTML". Perhaps it is a design feature after all.