The two (identical) bills that would require the State of Texas to move towards open document formats are scheduled for a public hearing on Monday, March 26, 2007 in both houses of the Texas Legislature. The Senate bill is SB446 and is sponsored by Hinojosa, and the House bill is HB1794 and is sponsored by Veasey. As reported earlier on this blog here and here, the bill requires the state to move towards open formats for documents that it produces in order to save money and to prevent format “lock in”. If approved, this move could be a boon to the use of open source by the state.

As a side note, for those of you that won’t be present (like myself), you can watch all the action over live video feeds on the net, available from the Texas Legislature Online homepage (for the main chamber) and committee meetings at the Senate and House sites.

This entry was posted Friday, March 23rd, 2007 at 10:00 am and is filed under Open Content, Texas. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.