The Massachusetts state government has named Louis Gutierrez to fill the position of chief information officer at the state’s Information Technology Division and, at the same time, reiterated its support for the state’s plan to implement the OpenDocument format in state agencies in January 2007.
A battle between supporters of Microsoft’s XML format and ODF led by IBM and Sun Microsystems convulsed the state’s IT operation for months, as both sides courted Massachusetts politicians.
In naming Gutierrez, currently chief technology strategist at UMass Medical School, the administration of Governor Mitt Romney appointed a CIO with a demonstrated commitment to open standards.
“Gutierrez will be responsible for overseeing the final stages of implementation of the state’s new Open Document format proposal, to go into effect in January 2007,” the state’s announcement said, signaling that Massachusetts remains committed to ODF. Over the past several months, the administration and politicians of both major political parties have batted the ODF-Microsoft debate back-and-forth.
We spent some time with this in earlier discussion — when the initiator of OpenDocs left after the political hammering he took. Nice to see the state stick to their guns.
Ah, great to see open source move forward. What format is next to tackle now?
Here in Australia, certain State Govt’s have made it clear (as well as some major corporations) that they intend to use OpenSource products instead on MS products. In fact some are already doing this.
From my observations the NSW Govt is introducing OpenOffice as it’s main Office Suite. The interesting thing is that I don’t believe they are running Linux but still using XP. The Queensland State Govt. are following suit as well.
Certain major corps have been stung by having a few illegal copies of MS Office etc on their computers. As a risk management strategy, they are simply turning to open source, as it appears MS aren’t really being overtly considerate that in one example, a company with over 5000 employees (and computers) there were one or two illegal copies that snuck through, but MS still pushed their claim.
Open Source and Free Ware will eventually basically own the market place for major apps. There will still be commercially available specific applications available for niche markets though. There will always e the need for specifically tailored programs.
It is nice to see more people getting on the bandwagon. As the Open Source market grows, it’s programing will improve. Large organizations like Sun and IBM won’t make as much a clout as the Commonwealth of Massachusetts will though.
The more I use Open Office, the more I like it. The only major complaints I have are the spell-check is weak and it is a pain to address envelopes.