peter hollings wrote:
A great idea! Why should our tax dollars go into any proprietary technology? Why not have a requirement that applied at the time of purchase that said that the purchased software must save its information in open formats? Why should our government buy software that stores information (e.g., word processing documents) in a proprietary format that not only is non-public, but under the terms of the purchaser's license cannot be reverse engineered? The public has a strong interest here and it seems that it's not being exercised for some reason, perhaps ignorance.
Well, the Word format is, I suppose, de facto proprietary, but that could be changed. I doubt if the format itself is patentable. What I'm proposing is to open up a closed format but not discard it. Paul