No matter how you look at it, the public won. They got the best combination and one that resulted in public information being stored in an open, standardized format that will not die with a single vendor.

Surely you can agree that it is necessary for the government to use open standards for how it stores data.

It is funny seeing you PFF guys get as worked up on your end as the FSF zealots get on their end. Your ideologies are all too often two sides of the same coin.

***It is funny seeing you PFF guys get as worked up on your end as the FSF zealots get on their end. Your ideologies are all too often two sides of the same coin.***

Actually, I and others at PFF have written several times about the public domain, fair use, narrowing the scope of patents and raising the non-obviousness standard in patent doctrine. These are not things "zealots" do.

My main disagreement with Massachusetts is its decision making process. The state probably knew there would be no accessibility features in non-Microsoft office suites, but thought that passing its initiative would be sufficient prodding to the FOSS groups to start working on that technology. Massachusetts probably also knew Microsoft would start something like the translator project to make Office docs compatible w/ ODF. So, in the end, consumers probably did win- but only because Microsoft acted, while FOSS groups showed ineptness towards consumers after having a procurement victory handed to them.

I didn't call y'all zealots. I called the FSF types zealots. My comment was the result of seeing a tendency here to advocate strong control for the inventor or copyright holder here, and no control on their side.

Hmmm, I still think these issues have been treated fairly on IPcentral through various posts on fair use. Generally I tend to agree with Professor Merges on the current digital media and copyright issues: See Merges here http://weblog.ipcentral.info/archives/2006/08/giving_right_to.html#more.