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Acting MA CIO Appointed, ODF A Go
Andy Updegrove writes "Massachusetts has appointed ITD COO Beth Pepoli as the acting CIO of the Commonwealth. At the same time, the Governor's Communications Director, Eric Fehrnstrom, has made the clearest statement yet that it is ODF that the new CIO will be implementing: 'There have been no changes in the commonwealth's published OpenDocument rules, and we are still on track for a January 2007 implementation.' We reported on the resignation of Peter Quinn in December.
Umm, a casual observer point of view is MS Office doesn't follow OpenDocument formatting so by saying the state will comply with ODF, they are giving MS the finger.
Check out www.groklaw.net, which has been covering this and the M$ fud about it, as well as the SCO stuff. Basically, ODF is an open standard produced by a consortium of companies and released for public use with no patents, license fees or other encumberances. M$ could add support for it in a heartbeat (though it may not support all their bu...features) but is refusing to do so as that would place them in competition with the various other office suites that do support it -- and they might not win that one. After all, several of the suites that do support it are free as in free beer, as well as in free speech. M$ is responding that we should use their "open" (but not really) new xml format that they don't even support yet, and which has various legal problems for implementors. Peter Quinn, the CIO who used to have the job, quit because of an M$ funded witchhunt that got him a lot of bad publicity and negative attention. Of course, he was later found to be guiltless, but that little retraction only made it to page four, rather than page one where the accusations were made... See groklaw for more detail.