Open Source Weblog

“It's clear that they've been lobbied pretty hard by vendors, lawyers, and others with interests in document-format legislation,” writes Mahugh, linking to comments on the ETRM legitimately submitted by IBM’s Rob Weir,Gesmer Updegrove’s Andy Updegrove, and FSF member Sam Hiser.

To refer to legitimate comments to a public consultation document as “lobbying” is disingenuous, especially given Microsoft’s track record in this regard.

It’s worth remembering that in response to the proposed adoption of ODF, Microsoft’s government affairs director, Brian Burke, promoted an amendment to a state bill designed to remove the decision-making powers of the Massachusetts Information Technology Division.

Now that's lobbying. (And let's not forget Florida's own Men In Black).

Meanwhile Jason Matusow, Microsoft's director of corporate standards, covers the news that ETRM 4.0 includes both OOXML and ODF under the headline “Policy Makers Being Balanced & Reasonable“.

The suggestion that Massachusetts was previously somehow being unbalanced and unreasonable is pretty rich. As I wrote in September 2005:

“While the software giant continues to lobby the state government to change its mind and accept that Microsoft's forthcoming Office Open XML Formats are open enough to be considered, there are other, more long-term options open to the company. These include adopting OpenDocument as a format within Office, and opening up its file formats to an industry standards body.”

To some extent the company did both (although whether it did either to satisfaction is a matter of opinion). In the meantime, it is worth noting that Massachusetts’ definition of “open formats” has not changed at any point:

“The Commonwealth defines open formats as specifications for data file formats that are based on an underlying open standard, developed by an open community, affirmed and maintained by a standards body and are fully documented and publicly available.”

Whether OOXML meets that definition is a matter of opinion, but given the definition hasn’t changed and Microsoft has it is pretty clear that if anyone was being unreasonable, it wasn’t the ITD.