Massachusetts Finalizes Plan to Use the OpenDocument Standard II

A follow up to this post. I was more then a bit perturbed when I read this “open letter”, from Alan Yates. It seems some people within Microsoft just aren't ready to compete fairly. He is brazen enough to bring up words like due process and acts as if Microsoft is the only one looking out for the good of the people. He insinuates somehow that Microsoft software is standard and that anything else is odd, non-standard and unprecedented. He claims that the OpenDocument format is “untested in the marketplace” while ignoring that the Microsoft XML format hasn't even been released yet. He flat out lies and says that all the office suites that support OpenDocument are derived from the same codebase. 30 seconds of due diligence would have cleared that up, but the response from KDE is here. He also insinuates that Microsoft is the only one that could possibly innovate and even brings into question the government procurement process, which has heavily favored Microsoft in almost every case I've seen. He somehow misses the fact that only Microsoft can officially support their current format and the future format is patent encumbered. He also leaves out that Microsoft is more than welcome to both join OASIS and implement the OpenDocument format into MS Office. I don't have time to tear this piece down line by line, but luckily some others have. The amount of shear FUD in this is astounding though and it'll be interesting to see how MA responds.
–jeremy
OpenDocument, OASIS, Open Source, Microsoft