But the statement by Betzold (and the reticence displayed by other legislators) indicates that many may not really understand what this is all about.  As Marshall McLuhan famously observed in a different setting, "The Medium is the Message."  Here requiring the use of open formats is public policy.  How those documents are defined is a matter of detail, for which expert advice can be sought, and readily obtained.

And second, in a situation like this, it is a cop out for legislatures to claim that they should defer to their IT departments to make decisions on open formats.  You don't have to have that good a memory to recall why these bills were introduced in the first place: not because state IT departments aren't a good place to make such decisions, but because successive State CIOs in Massachusetts had been so roughly handled in trying to make these very decisions that no state CIO in his or her right mind was likely to volunteer to be the next sacrificial victim.

As both Peter Quinn and Louis Gutierrez both found out, trying to make responsible standards-related decisions where huge sums of vendor revenues are at stake is scarcely a career-enhancing pastime. CIOs should be entitled to stay out of harm's way, and try their best to serve the public's interests the best they can. Where that can't be done, legislatures should protect them, and keep them safe from the types of unwarranted threats and attacks that Carol Sliwa reported on in a series of public-records request-based stories at ComputerWorld last December.

The third reason why legislatures should intervene is because they can modify commercial behavior.  Taking the most cynical view possible (often the safest choice, when speaking of politics and commerce), ODF has gotten as far as it can because companies other than Microsoft saw advantages for themselves in uniting behind it.  The action of the Massachusetts Information Technology Division brought the issue into the limelight, and attracted global attention.  Microsoft opened its OfficeOpen XML formats in competitive response, in order to confront the challenge of ODF-compliant products, and to meet the requirements of its government customers.  It submitted the OOXML format to Ecma, and it is now before ISO.  However one feels about whether ISO should, or should not, approve OOXML, that is still a very long way from the status quo ante, when OOXML was wholly proprietary.  The courage of Peter Quinn and his team was instrumental in getting us to where we are today.

So I'm disappointed. And not just on behalf of open documents, but on behalf of the CIOs of this country, who are now caught between a rock and a hard place, without a paddle to defend themselves with if they won't to do anything new, innovative and necessary, if a major vendor's ox might be gored in consequence.

For further blog entries on ODF and OOXML, click here

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