New York Jumps Into Open Formats Fray

cyrusmack writes "Hot on the heels of the bad news regarding the defeat of all open formats bills, New York has become the latest in an area that has seen a flurry of activity already this year. In the article on InfoWorld, it's pretty clear that this bill is significantly watered down from what other states have attempted to do this year. You can bet Microsoft will be there in force, just as it has been elsewhere."

Comments

Re:bullshit

[KingMotley]

Well, yes. Quantum mechanics is also such a misunderstood term. Nevertheless, both "open format" and "quantum mechanics" have important, well defined meanings, and the responsibility is on you to understand and use them correctly. I agree, unfortunately, your definitions are wrong. "Open formats" is well-defined, but it has nothing to do with copyrights or patents. "Open formats" means what it always has, no matter how hard people like you try to redefine it to be what you want it to be. "Open formats" means that the format is documented and available to third parties. That is IT. It doesn't mean that it's free. It doesn't mean that it's not copyrighted or patented. Those things are covered by a GPL, or other similiar arrangement.

ODF is an open format, OOXML is a closed, proprietary format. Again, your bias shows through. OOXML is open. It's fully documented. It's been approved as an ANSI standard. It's even free to use (although that goes beyond just being open). It's also used by more than just microsoft. So it's neither closed, nor proprietary as you claim.