As reported here before, Massachusetts decided last month that all the documents its employees create have to be in the OpenDocument format. This, according to Markham, “could be the trigger for a revolution that will increase consumer choice and ensure the survival of documents that could be of historical importance in the future.”
Open formats are an important part of computing freedom (although alone they are not sufficient) because they give people full control of their own data. In future years, when this freedom is commonplace, I predict that the Massachusetts Decision will be seen as the turning point.
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