Slashdot reports that the Belgian Government will be requiring the use of the Open Document Format (ODF) with documents beginning in the fall of 2008. They also indicate that software should be able to read ODF the year prior.

Now if the State of Massachusetts will hold their ground and other goverments will follow suit, perhaps OpenOffice users will finally be able to share files with everyone else in the ODF format. Students will also be able to use OO without having to purchase MS Office. Whether this will be the end of MS's dominance in the office productivity suite market is debatable. But at least it would push MS to compete in the market based on the quality of their software instead of maintaining their dominance simply because everyone is using their format.