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Let's summarize... For those less fortunate that may stumble upon this blog just now.

Microsoft is the king of commercial software. One of Microsoft's best known products is Microsoft Office, MSO for short. For thirty and more years Microsoft has made millions selling software. Many and more of those millions were made selling MSO.

MSO is what's called a "office productivity software suite" or "office software"; bundling together different applications into an integrated whole. After many years, MSO has become the staple, the "must-have" software, of most businesses and governments out there. To the point that virtually every other "software suite" for business has disappeared.

On the other hand...

Two distinct but parallel movements, the Free Software movement and the Open Source Software movement, have been producing software that defies the notion of purely commercial software. The success of these movements cannot be measured in dollars and cents, but rather by the one large, and growing, community of open-source software developers and users that continually work to release and improve their own open-source software. Such software that comes from the open-source community can be used by all, free of charge, but we will get to that later. This open-source community has released a piece of software similar, some would say better, then MSO. It is called OpenOffice.org, or OO.o for short. Yes that is the official name, with the ".org" and all. It has Writer instead of Word, Calc instead of Excel, Impress instead of PowerPoint, Base instead of Access, the list could go on...

To summarize the summary:

• MSO costs money, it is commercial software.
• OO.o costs nothing, it is open-source software.

Both, are good!

But then we have to talk about, data, archives, documents. And how you go about making them, accessing them, changing them, archiving them...

Once you produce your document with MSO you are forever (well, not really, but let's not get ahead of ourselves) tied to MSO for editing that document. If you should make your business by using MSO then you have tied your business forever to Microsoft. Because Microsoft has made sure that it is almost impossible for a document made with their MSO to be used on any other computer application. And it's even harder to access those documents with a "software suite" that competes with MSO!

Massachusetts now.

The state of Massachusetts has decided, that what is the most important thing is not how good a particular software application is, nor the feature count that it has, or how well it integrates with another application from the same manufacturer. Although these things have value, what they decided was that their sovereignty over the data, the information, that these applications produce is of paramount importance. And if the data is stored in a format that does not belong to any one software maker but is instead an open standard freely usable not only by the government, but by software makers, independent software vendors, anyone really, then they, the government of Massachusetts stands a better chance of controlling their data. This will also mean they can decide what software application they will entrust with the creating, editing, and archiving of their documents.

Using an open and standardized document format means that 30 years down the road the government (and its citizens!) of Massachusetts will be able to get, read, and edit if needed, the documents that are being created today. What if Microsoft folds in the next ten years? How will you activate your copy of MSO? How will you get your data? If the data is in a Microsoft format, is it even yours?

Microsoft response.

The Open Document Format (ODF for short!) that Massachusetts has decided to use can be implemented by anyone. OO.o has already done so in the version 2 of OpenOffice.org. AbiWord another open source word processing application also supports it. Microsoft could do the same thing, right?

Nope.

Microsoft is now trying to have the formats that MSO version 12 will use as a standard. If all goes well we will have not one but two standards for office productivity suites. That's good isn't it?

Nope.

The Open Document Format is a standard, but one that is also royalty free, and freely usable, and implementable by anyone. If you wanted you could write your own software to read and write ODF formatted documents.

But what about Microsoft's format? Last thing I heard you have to pay Microsoft royalties in order to use their format in your application. It may be open but it isn't free (as in cost) nor free (as in freedom). Microsoft's move to submit their office format to a standards body doesn't really mean that it's open, only that it's a standard. And even if Microsoft required no royalties it could still impose some gotchas in the format in the form of legal clauses that make it impossible for open source software to implement this "standard".

We must wait and see if Microsoft standard is truly open...

But while we do that, there are already implementations of a truly open, and free (as in freedom), document format that we can use without the fear of who really owns our data, but us.

The information soldier likes open, standard, and royalty-free...