Warning. If you read any further, you will find yourself at ground 0.0 of the biggest battle the computer industry has ever seen. It is where the biggest warriors from the proprietary software world, the open standards world, and the open source world are engaged in hand-to-hand combat. At least for the moment, the open source and open standards worlds (the Rebel Alliance) appear to have joined sides against the proprietary warlords, led by Microsoft. Both on and off the field (where negotiators have failed to broker a truce), the engagement has not been pretty. But this is war. For the first time in the battle’s history, the Rebel Alliance has dealt the warlords a stunning blow. “We were railroaded.” Those were not Microsoft’s exact words, but if you were a fly on the wall during my recent series of correspondences with Microsoft’s Alan Yates regarding how Microsoft’s XML-based Office file formats ended up off of Massachusetts’ list of approved file formats (essentially pulling the state’s plug on future usage of Microsoft Office), it would be difficult to summarize his opinion in any other way. To the untrained eye, the Massachusetts decision– formally known as that state’s Enterprise Technical Reference Model (henceforth referred to as…