Thursday, September 01, 2005

Massachusetts to adopt 'open' desktop

Tech News on ZDNetreports that
The commonwealth of Massachusetts has proposed a plan to phase out office productivity applications from Microsoft and other providers in favor of those based on 'open' standards, including the recently approved OpenDocument standard.

The state described the plan in a posting made to its Web site earlier this week as part of a public review process. Massachusetts agencies have until Jan. 1, 2007, to install applications that support the OpenDocument file formats and phase out other products.
I hope they succeed, but I wouldn't bet a whole lot on it. I hadn't even heard of this standard or associated toolset. Apparently it is supported by Sun, Novell, and IBM. We'll see.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

You haven't heard of OpenOffice? It's pretty neat. But since the newest one uses Java it's a bit of a memory hog.

Russ Abbott said...

I'd heard of Sun's OpenOffice, but I didn't realise it was set up as either an open standard or open source.