Sun urges Massachusetts to reject Open XML

IDG News Service - Sun Microsystems Inc. today urged a Massachusetts state official to rethink an opinion that Microsoft Corp.'s Open XML meets the state's parameters for an acceptable open document format just because it has been submitted as an open standard.

In a letter signed by Carl Cargill, director of corporate standards at Sun, the company asked the state to keep in mind the reasons for its previous commitment to the Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) specification. The office of Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney has proposed OpenDocument as the standard format for documents generated by state government agencies.

"The Commonwealth's process began as an effort to ensure that the documents created by its agencies would be owned by those offices and by its citizens for all eternity -- without the need to negotiate or pay for continued access to them again in the future each time a new version of proprietary software is released," Cargill wrote in the letter, viewed Monday by the IDG News Service. "This process began with a desire to create a level playing field so that innovation in the market would flourish, enabling better delivery of government services."

The letter is in response to a statement released by Massachusetts Administration and Finance Secretary Tom Trimarco last Wednesday, two days after Microsoft announced it would submit its proprietary Open XML format to two international standards bodies.

Microsoft will use Open XML in its Office productivity suite. The company submitted Open XML to the International Standards Organization (ISO) and Ecma International, a European association for standardizing information and communication systems.

Microsoft has committed to handing over its Open XML document formats for Word, Excel and PowerPoint to be adopted as open standards in time for the launch of the next version of its Office software suite, code-named Office 12. In his statement last week, Trimarco said the state is "optimistic that Office Open XML will meet our new standards for acceptable open formats" if Microsoft follows through with this plan.

This leaves the door open for Massachusetts to continue to use Microsoft Office rather than migrate away from the suite, as it would do if it moved to OpenDocument. Microsoft Office does not support OpenDocument, but Sun's StarOffice, IBM's Workplace suite and OpenOffice.org's OpenOffice software do.


OpenDocument is a file format, based on XML and developed within the OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) Web consortium, that covers the features required by text, spreadsheets, charts and graphical documents.

In his letter, Cargill said it would be