The Mandelbear's Musings

Groklaw points to, and comments on, this article in which various representatives of Microsoft are quoted whining about Massachusetts' decision to dump M$'s closed file formats for the OpenDoc standard. To quote from the article's conclusions, which are well worth reading:

If recent history is any indicator of whether open source developers see sub-licensability or transferability as being a negotiable item, then the answer is that it clearly isn't. A little more than a year ago, the Internet Engineering Task Force's deliberations regarding potential e-mail sender authentication standards (to combat spam) fell to pieces after open source developers including the Apache Software Foundation took umbrage at the non-transferability terms found in Microsoft's license to one of the foundation technologies under consideration. Microsoft refused to remove the terms.

Not only should Massachusetts desire that level of openness in the same way any organization should (for any specification), but as a government in the United States, the Commonwealth has to tread very lightly when doing anything that could be viewed by the public as fettering an open free market or endorsing restraint of competition.

Microsoft, of course, is free to argue that sub-licensability and transferability are not as critical as open source advocates such as Larry Rosen make it out to be. If you're Massachusetts-- an "organization" that must take its public's interests into account--Microsoft's position on what open source developers should be concerning themselves with is not as important as what open source developers (a part of "the public") are actually concerned with (as evidenced by the e-mail authentication and WS-Security snafus).

The great thing about Massachusetts' decision is that their criteria for open standards are all easily traced back to state sovereignty and the need for citizens' present and future access to state documents not be tied to the whims of any corporate provider -- especially a convicted monopolist with a well-earned reputation for dealing in bad faith.