WebProNews

Jim Prendergast, executive director of Americans for Technology Leadership, wrote an op-ed piece for Fox News on the Microsoft-Massachusetts OpenDocument format argument.

In the first version of the article, Prendergast opined that there were problems with the state's decision to opt for an open, non-proprietary document format. Lots of scary comments about enormous taxpayer costs and other negative thoughts pepper the article.

There was one little bit of information left out of the Prendergast article, which now appears there. Prendergast's organization was founded by and is funded by Microsoft. Fox News has stepped up to acknowledge the omission, and posted several reader responses to the network about the article.

Those responses pick apart the article on various points, like cost and competition. "The costs to convert to OpenDocument were estimated at $5 million; upgrading the current vendor's product would cost $50 million, both in license fees and upgraded PCs to support the newer product," one emailer, Bob Halloran, wrote to Fox in answer to the cost issue.

Another letter from Brian Thomas said: "The policy -- for the first time -- opens competition for software, which can read and write public documents in the state. Previous to this, only Microsoft was realistically allowed to provide office document software, because of the de facto standardization on their file formats, which they do not share with anyone."

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. Email him here.