Who opposes the state's effort to ditch Microsoft Office?

adamg — Fri, 23 Sep 2005 16:16:59 +0000

Well, Microsoft, of course.

But also Citizens Against Government Waste:

"It is bad procurement policy for any state to unilaterally lock itself into one set of technologies," CAGW President Tom Schatz said.

Oh, horrors! How could our state officials be making such a potentially costly (even deadly!) mistake?

But then you calm down and you start to wonder who, exactly, is Citizens Against Government Waste. And along comes somebody like Michael Smith to explain that CAGW is actually a front for large corporations. In fact, if you go to CAGW's links page and scroll down to "Technology Reform Links," you'll find a link to www.microsoft.com with this note:

Visit the Microsoft website to examine the future of cyber technology!

Astroturf, anyone? More on CAGW.

The Openwealth of Massachusetts

adamg — Thu, 01 Sep 2005 19:51:16 +0000

Open-source geeks are all a-twitter over a draft policy that would have Masssachusetts adopt open XML specs for state documents, because it could mean the state will get rid of all of its copies of Microsoft Office, which uses proprietary Microsoft specifications.

Stephen think it's a cool win for the open-source movement, but tells the geeks to back off on the historical analogies:

The Boston Tea Party was 232 years ago. So when the state of Massachusetts decides to require open data formats like PDF or OpenOffice, please don't use the Tea Party as an analogy. It's not funny.

open source

Who opposes the state's effort to ditch Microsoft Office?

The Openwealth of Massachusetts