MA Says MS Agrees to Change XML License To Meet New Open Format Standard: “Massachusetts is opening the door further. A year ago, as you recall, the state announced agencies were required to give equal consideration to Open Source software. Today, there was a meeting of the Massachusetts Software Council where Eric Kriss, secretary of administration and finance, said that all agencies will be required to store public documents in nonproprietary formats such as HTML or PDF. Acceptable formats, according to the state’s Information Technology Division, are now Rich Text Format v. 1.7 (.rtf);Plain Text Format (.txt);Hypertext Document Format (.htm);Portable Document Format (.pdf) – Reference version 1.5;Extensible Markup Language (XML) v. 1.0 (Third Edition) or v 1.1 ‘when necessary’. What about Microsoft’s notorious patent clause in their Office 2003 XML Reference Schema Patent License? 1 It seems that Massachusetts has been having discussions with Microsoft over changing those terms so MS can qualify, and miracle of miracles, Dan Bricklin’s eye-popping notes of the speech indicate that Microsoft told the state of Massachusetts that it is willing to bend to be included.”

(Via GrokLaw.)