In a letter penned by the director of corporate standards for Sun, Carl Cargill, the company has asked the state of Massachusetts to reconsider its stance on Microsoft's Open XML and whether it meets the acceptable parameters for an open format.
The Commonwealth's process began as an effort to ensure that the documents created by its agencies would be owned by those offices and by its citizens for all eternity - without the need to negotiate or pay for continued access to them again in the future each time a new version of proprietary software is released," Cargill wrote. "This process began with a desire to create a level playing field so that innovation in the market would flourish, enabling better delivery of government services."