In a resounding victory for Microsoft Corp., bills seeking to mandate the use of open document formats by government agencies have been defeated in five states, and only a much-watered-down version of such legislation was signed into law in a sixth state.

Despite my personal preference for Free and Open Source Software and open-standard documents, almost every document I create eventually ends up in some proprietary format. But proprietary formats, while convenient in their ubiquity, are inherently problematic, and there are some very compelling reasons to think twice about how you save your files.

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.

How legally defensible are proprietary data formats? That's the question asked in this fascinating piece from Nature. T

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EuroparlTV seems to work only for users of either Adobe’s proprietary Flash player (via the proprietary Adobe Flash file format) or users of Microsoft’s Windows Media Player (via the proprietary WMV file format).

What this means to an open web, that is usable for everyone should be clear.

If you look back on the history of OpenOffice.org, it makes the 3.2 release that came out on Thursday the 11th even more impressive.

I received this very interesting email today, Lulu raising an important question of weaning the teachers off the proprietary software document formats.

Its such an important issue that I decided to blog my answer and also I request you to comment and share your experiences too.

In the past, ITWire has been less than flattering over Microsoft’s OpenXML document format. Make no mistake, an open file format is definitely a must-have. Nevertheless, it exists so let’s be pragmatic: OpenXML can greatly bridge the gap between Windows and Linux. In fact, it can open up whole new opportunities for Linux coders to produce documents in a Microsoft-friendly format.

Although Microsoft publicly testifies from every available pulpit of their deep longing for multiple document formats, a quick glance at reality shows that this love remains unrequited in their products. For example, what new formats does Office 2007 include out of the box?