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Texas Bill For Open Documents
Ditesh Kumar tips us to a blog entry by Sam Hiser noting a bill filed in Texas that would require state agencies to conduct their work in an open document format. After Microsoft's grueling battle against ODF in Massachusetts, bluest of blue states, it must be galling to face te same fight in the reddest of the red. Hiser notes that the bill includes a rigorous and sound definition of an open document format, which ODF would meet but Microsoft's current OOXML submission would not.
"Texas probably also means Microsoft's OOXML for Texas documents.
Some years ago Microsoft threated the city of Huston to sign up for a multiyear, $12 million software licensing plan or face an audit exposing the city's use of software it hadn't paid for.
But as it turned out, Huston had more than enough proof of purchase seals. And then they voted to dump Microsoft Office in favor of SimDesk because of Microsoft's gestapo tactics. I don't know if that's still true today and I doubt SimDesk supports OOXML. So not all parts of Texas are friends of Microsoft.
Or Austin, for that matter.
Austin's about as red as the Santa Fe sky on a clear afternoon, or Australia's Coral Coast. Add to that a bunch of tech industry, a huge university and about 2000 miles between it and Redmond, and this is hardly surprising.
Austin's where I first heard about Linux... in January of 1992. Slackware was on sale in the University co-op a year or so later. And it's where I first used USENET, IRC and internet e-mail, way back in 1991.