E-M:/ Open digital standards

[Larry Nooden <ldnum@umich.edu>]

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Enviro-Mich message from Larry Nooden <ldnum@umich.edu>
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Environmental awareness and action depend increasingly on unfettered 
digital communication, and special interests (particularly Microsoft) are 
increasingly are trying to get this under their control for their profit. 
This is especially true for communications, but it also applies to 
documents.  We seem to be in a period of active information suppression by 
our top elected officials, and it could easily get worse if they can 
interfere with digital communications.  You may remember that the Bush 
administration essentially let Microsoft (big $ donors) off the hook after 
their monopoly conviction.

There is a small community fighting for open digital standards, and they 
have an online petition at:
	<http://www.noooxml.org/petition>

This movement is much stronger overseas than in the US, which means we will 
probably not be major players in the future.  A very strong start is 
represented by Open Office (<http://www.openoffice.org/>) which does what 
MS Office does, but it is free, and I think better.



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