Massachusetts officially embraces open source

The Massachusetts legislature has instructed its chief technology officer to adopt a policy of “open standards, open source” for all future spending on information technology. The directive likely wouldn’t completely cut out Microsoft from the state’s $US80million ($115 million) technology budget. But it may have been the clearest example yet of a US state government taking sides – against Microsoft – in the most important struggle in the software industry.

With more than $US32 billion in sales last year, Microsoft doesn’t usually worry about losing one customer. But this one may be different.