The week in technology: Microsoft goes open source
Microsoft backed down on its proprietary stance over document formats but, if it was hoping for a pat on the back from the wider internet community, it should have known better.
In recognition of the rising popularity of the OpenDocument format (ODF) - especially among national and state governments - Microsoft agreed to offer new free open source tools that will allow its Office suite of programmes to handle documents in rival formats.
For the famously proprietary software giant - which next week is set to be fined millions of dollars a day by European regulators for failure to provide the necessary tools to allow competitors to interoperate - there was a lot of talk of commitments to interoperability and other magnanimous concepts such as customer ?choice? and ?freedom?.
