Oh, sweet.... Mark Leno, a Democrat from San Francisco, has introduced a bill to the California legislature that requires state documents are kept in an open document/open source format.

In other words, he's saying: "Look, these documents belong to the people and we shouldn't lock them up in a proprietary Microsoft format as they are today."

Makes sense. State documents should be readable by anyone, at any time, for free.

You go, Mark! About time someone did this.... California, Texas and Minnesota are now moving in this direction.

The bill is California A.B. 1668 if anyone wants to look it up. Or you can just use the resource box I added to the right of this article -- it has a link to the bil.

Anyhow, this is like a previous bill in Massachusetts (though I like the California version better -- but I'm biased...) and when that bill hit Microsoft had a panic attack. I mean, as far as Microsoft is concerned, it has the sole and absolute rights to anything anyone might write, ever, and if you mess with those rights, they'll mess with you.

Microsoft's campaign to kill the Mass. bill even, allegedly, included a personal smear campaign against the public servant who originally proposed the move.

Microsoft is acting more like a tobacco company all the time....

Anyhow, Massachusetts is nice and all, but if California goes down this road, well... Redmond is hyperventilating right now.

Groklaw now has memos indicating that Microsoft is circulating e-mails, etc. that try to rally people to a campaign against Leno's bill.

(The smear campaign against Leno will start any day now, I guess...)

I think we should all support this bill and kick proprietary formats out of government.

I've added a resource box to this story (to the right of the main story) that has info about the bill, about the Groklaw findings, and a link where you can send e-mail in support of the bill...

In other words, it's a nice tidy package of civic journalism, CityTools style. Use the links in the resource box!

Send some e-mail, make yourself heard. Kick Microsoft in the butt...