In the spirit of the controversial move in Massachusetts mandating open file formats, a bill has been introduced in the Texas State Legislature which would similarly require Texas state agencies to use an open standard format for office productivity documents.

Given the recent release of the .doc to ODF conversion tool for MS, there is very little reason to resist this legislation other than it threatens MS's market share. Using ODF would benefit the state financially--agencies could use OO instead of paying for MS Office--and also is the best solution for file archival. As has been repeatedly demonstrated in the past by MS, we cannot count on them to maintain file format compatibility across versions. Instead file format incompatibility is used as method by Microsoft to preserve their market share and force users to upgrade to the latest version of the software.