“I received an email yesterday pointing me to a bill, introduced
on March 27, that would require all Executive branch agencies in
the state of Minnesota to ‘use open standards in situations where
the other requirements of a project do not make it technically
impossible to do this.’ The text of the bill is focused
specifically on ‘open data formats,’ and would amend the existing
statute that establishes the authority of the Office of Enterprise
Technology (OET), and the duties of the states Chief Information
Officer. While the amendment does not refer to open source
software, the definition of ‘open standards’ that it contains would
be conducive to open source implementations of open standards. The
text of the affected sections of Minnesota Statutes Chapter 16E,
showing the amendments proposed, can be found here.“The fact that such a bill has been introduced is significant in
a number of respects…”