Legislation making the use of open standards for government agencies required in the states of California, Florida, Texas, Oregon, and Connecticut has lost support. Personally I feel this is a great thing! Not that I am against open standards being used in government, or anywhere else for that matter, but recently the whole story around using open standards in government has been a loaded subject.
As you all probably now there is this one thing going on right now in the world of document format standards. The Office Open XML specification is going through the ISO standardization process, like IBM's Sun's ODF has done before it.
Personally I am taking part in the Dutch chapter of this process, enjoying great discussions about the merits of Office Open XML versus ODF. I am amazed at the level of critique being raised by IBM against Office Open XML, ranging from low-blow, to plainly incorrect.
You can think of 'objections' being made such as 'according to ISO rule nr XXX this specification should have been supplied in human readable form, but the document is a zip container which I cannot read', really focusing on the details which require discussion. There have already been numerous occasion during the meeting where someone raised a remark such as 'even documents saved from Word do not validate against the schemas' and I ask to explain a bit further because I haven't experienced the same, only to have a reply 'I'll get back to you'. Well that's just dandy!
All in all I think it's best for everyone to cool down, look at the facts, and leave the important decisions to a later moment in time when everyone can view the world objectively again. The binary stuff where we came from before Office Open XML was difficult at best, so let's try and keep us from doing the same in the future again (such as the ratification of a standard which does not even include spreadsheet formulas)
p.s. A funny note is how this news is being put on Slashdot: Computerworld discusses the defeat of pro-ODF legislation, while the story is really about not requiring any format at this time.
[I stand corrected Orcmid]