"The commonwealth of Massachusetts has done a 180 degree turn and decided to support Microsoft's Office Open XML format in addition to the OASIS Open Document Format."

According to a press release issued today by the Portuguese Open Source Business Association, the government of Portugal has decided to approve the OpenDocument Format as the single editable, XML-based document format for use by government, and in public procurement.

The recent decision by the Open Document Foundation to substitute the World Wide Web Consortium's Compound Document Format in place of the format it was set up to promote, the Open Document Format, has sparked a contentious debate over what shape the format should take.

The first international workshop of Open Document Format (ODF) public sector users took place in Berlin on 29-30 October 2007, hosted by the Foreign Office of the Federal Republic of Germany.

Today is Document Freedom Day 2010. For the third time, groups all over the world are celebrating open document formats and Open Standards. They are raising awareness for how a technical issue impacts our day-to-day lives.

"The OpenDocument Format Alliance (ODF Alliance), the leading organization advocating for openness and accessibility to government documents and information, today congratulated Japan for adopting a policy under which government ministries and agencies will solicit bids from software vendors whose products support internationally recognized open standards."

This paper provides legal implications of formats and explains why it is better to adopt format based on open standards. Guidelines for implementing open formats are also provided.

The South American nation of Venezuela is the latest country to adopt the Open Document Format (ODF) as a national standard

the Dutch government has recently attracted Microsoft's anger by launching an actionplan to adopt open standards, and concretely OpenDocument Format by April 2008 in the national government. Open Standards will become mandatory and Free Software will be preferred. As the Minister of State, Frank Heemskerk, argued, this plan is not to exclude any company, but to stimulate information exchange, vendor independence and choice for various software products that implement open standards. he Ministry of Economical Affairs has published an English version of the plan on its site today.