Breakthrough for open source
Beta News reports that the State of Massachusetts plans to eliminate Microsoft Office as an option for creating new documents.
If the policy is implemented all documents will have to be saved in open source XML or Adobe’s universally recognised PDF.
This is a potential blow for Microsoft and the company has understandably protested vigorously. More governments and agencies are looking at open source options to reduce their massive licensing costs. The biggest obstacle in the past has been compatability issues.
The growing acceptance of PDF and the development of XML have reduced some of these barriers. I don’t fully understand the technology of XML, but the implications of its mainstream acceptance appear obvious.
In my own work environment we aim to convert all public documents to PDF for security, reduced size and portability.
Although not all open source, PDF readers are free and cross-platform.
I'm a 41-year-old father of four working as a newspaper editor at Mount Gambier in South Australia.
September 29th, 2005 at 6:22 pm
Where I work, all official documentation is disseminated in .pdf format. Unfortunately, dissemination only occurs top-down and so we plebs still have to use Office.
September 29th, 2005 at 6:53 pm
It’s a problem at our workplace that only 4/200 computers are licensed with Adobe Acrobat (including mine).
I’d like to see us shift to OpenOffice for writing docs. That way anyone can convert to PDF.
There are free PDF writers, but the organisation is reluctant to use freeware.