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Enterprise open source Toolkit

Story: Legal worries led Massachusetts to open standards

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Posted by: David Finch (Tuesday 6 September 2005, 2:34 PM)

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Microsoft made the decision themselves. They decided that they'd rather face the consequences of disgruntled customers than license their Office formats in a non-discrimatory fashion. They said sure, we'll license this on a non-royalty basis, unless your software is open source. They were willing to lose Massachusetts to "gain" non-interoperability. It's not even that they wouldn't support OpenDocument. They didn't have to when this all started. All they had to do was make their already-published formats open source compatible. Having to support OpenDocument or else lose a government customer is the direct consequence of their failure to do so.

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