Boston.com / Business / In open source gain, Bay State locks horns with Microsoft

Boston.com / Business / In open source gain, Bay State locks horns with Microsoft:

By Justin Pope, Associated Press, 10/19/2003

"In a memo sent last month, Massachusetts Administration and Finance Secretary Eric Kriss instructed the state's 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 $80 million technology budget.

But it may have been the clearest example yet of a state government taking sides -- against Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft -- in the most important struggle in the software industry.

Microsoft's software generally uses 'proprietary' code that the company closely guards. Its biggest threat is from 'open source' operating systems led by Linux, whose core components are public, and which users are free to pass around and customize as they like.

Governments are a huge market, accounting for about 10 percent of global information technology spending, according to research firm IDC. Federal, state and local governments in the United States spent $34 billion last year on huge systems to track everything from tax collection to fishing licenses."