Any vendor of office productivity products who refused to support it would effectively exclude themselves from consideration.

But now the battle has taken an ugly turn: it has gone political. According to Yahoo News (UK and Ireland) the plan to adopt ODF as the standard for all office documents looks set to become the centre of a political tug of war. Local news reports indicate that Secretary of State William Galvin, whose office is responsible for the State Records Centre, the Massachusetts Archive, and the Public Records Division, among other things, do not plan to participate in the move to ODF 1.0 as the standard for all office documents by January 2007.

Microsoft is already on record as saying it has no plans to adopt the ODF format so the company is probably quite pleased about these developments. However, conspiracy theorists on the Web are claiming Galvin`s reaction has been ‘bought` by contributions to his election campaign – he`s reportedly standing for Governor next year.