L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa following my Twitter feed

Don't ask me why, because I don't have a clue, but Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa is following my Twitter feed. That means the mayor has his own Twitter feed. (Should I return the favor and follow it?)

Mr. Mayor (or should I use the inside-baseball moniker Hizzoner?), does this mean your interest in free, open-source software is piqued?

Do me a solid, Antonio (I can call you Antonio? We are joined together by the miracle of Twitter, are we not?), when you're reforming the L.A. Unified School District, can you get them to stop sending us .docx and .xlsx documents and spreadsheets? For one thing, we have a lot of trouble opening them because here at the not-taxpayer-funded Daily News, we don't even have old copies of Microsoft Office, let alone the new ones that use the accursed .docx and .xlsx formats, and we have to make sure we have a machine equipped with the free, open-source OpenOffice 3.1 to open and convert those troublesome files that Redmond, Wash.'s main employer has foisted upon us.

Here's the other thing: Having LAUSD send such newfangled and annoying Office-created documents only highlights how much money the district has and is not afraid to spend, spend, spend.

Put the whole district on OpenOffice 3.1 (the free suite that's getting sweeter all the time), dear mayor.

And while you're at it, now's a great time to begin rolling out desktop Linux and other open-source technologies all across the city. We can save money and love freedom (that's what free, open-source software is all about, my good friend Antonio) at the same time.

Don't know much about what's happening in free, open-source software? You can get started with my 1000+ blog posts on this very subject. Fascinating reading, to be sure. Every last one.

And while we're at it, teaching our kids about this great (and did I forget to mention freedom-loving) software — Linux, OpenOffice, even Apache, Perl, Ruby, and that classic of classics, C — is just the way to break at least the geekiest portion of the LAUSD out of its troubled box.

The last LAUSD school-site computer lab I visited (and no, every school does not even have such a lab) was built pretty much entirely with grant- and parent-suppled funds. Seeing the mix of dying hardware outfitted with a hornet's nest of Windows XP and a bunch of junky software led me to wonder just what computers are really for anyway in our schools.

Really, Antonio — let's start with City Hall. How about a little Ubuntu in your office? Couldn't hurt. I bet even Arnold hasn't thought of it.