Proprietary Standards are just another "Tax" for governments

When you read this article about Open Office and Microsoft battling for the file format standards you get the distinct impression that anything that are not open standards are just another tax for governments impossed on the people.

Personally I'm not against proprietary standards and intellectual property, but when it comes to my Federal, State, and local governments using proprietary, closed standards it now costs me, a taxpayer, more money to access government documents. If I do not have the correct program to access government services I now have to purchase the correct one in order to get that acess I am now "being taxed" by my government. With open standards which everyone agrees upon the program that I now own will probably be converted to the new standard so as to not be left out of the competition for my hard earned cash.

Public and open standards rarely "tax" anyone, but proprietary ones do.