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Story: Denmark urges govt support for open source

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It's just you!

While it's easy to trivialize this sort of study and the US versus the reality is that Microsoft's monopoly position both on the desktop and in the mindset means that competition and the resulting innovation are lacking.

Take IE for example. Ever since Microsoft 'won' the browser war IE's development has all but ceased. And Office hasn't significantly changed since Office 97 (except for the bug count).

Until government's start promoting alternatives to a monopoly, the industry will continue to stagnate. However, it's important to note that this doesn't mean that government needs to unfairly promote alternatives to Microsoft.

For eaxmple, government can say that they will only use file formats that are openly published and available for all to use. Microsoft isn't disadvantaged with a decision like this, but it means that others can actually produce competing products without the added expense of having to deal with an unpublished, and unnecessarilyt complex file format like dot-doc.

Once an open file format is established all government needs to do is maintain the standards for all software but saying that software that doesn't support the standard, or software that tries to break the standard, won't be considered until if works with the standard. This will stop any attempts to Embrace and Extend.

The OpenOffice.org file format would be an excellent choice. It's openly published (in a detailed 400 page document), open to use by any one, and also opent o contribution by anyone. And while some express concern that Office doesn't support this format, if governments said this is the format we're using and to sell you software to us you need to suppor this format properly I'm sure Microsoft has enough money to get support for the format in place. It might even help them sell copies of their next version of Office.

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