With the filing of a new bill in Oregon, five US states have now taken legislative action around adopting open documents. Still, government agencies in the US lag way behind those in Europe in moving beyond Windows lock-in. In one big bright note, though, the ODF (OpenDocuments Format) Alliance--a one-year-old organization backed by Microsoft rivals such as IBM and Sun--seems to be spurring a lot of positive change.

So far, the government document landscape in the US has been overwhelmingly dominated by three proprietary formats, acknowledged Marino Marcich, managing director of the alliance, in an interview with LinuxPlanet. Specifically, Marcich cited .DOC, Microsoft's Word document format, .PPT, Microsoft's PowerPoint presentation format, and .XLS, Microsoft's format for Excel spreadsheets.

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