Andy Updegrove of the Standards Blog is disappointed in the state legislators who have failed to pass open file format legislation. It’s their responsibility, he argues, to guarantee that government data is available into the future in an accessible format.

I would further argue it’s their responsibility to be as neutral as possible when it comes to provisioning and encouraging products, even just by using said products in their workplaces.

Though this first round in US state legislatures has not been a success, I am very encouraged to see the largest setbacks have been confined to the USA. Other countries around the world are standardizing on ODF at a fast pace, while many large governments have gone even further, to roll out OpenOffice.org on hundreds of thousands of government-owned computers (Brazil and France have been particularly aggressive, for two examples).

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 19th, 2007 at 2:25 pm and is filed under Free Culture, ODF, Open Source, OpenOffice.org. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.