Not ODF - so what?

Recently, Barack Obama said that he'd like to make available all the US government's data online in "universally accessible formats". A lot of people immediately assumed that the format he was talking about was OpenDocument, and got very excited. A second wave of people has pointed out that "universally accessible formats" could be a number of different things.

Does it really matter? Okay, it would be nice to have such an endorsement of OpenDocument, but the "accessible formats" part wasn't the crux of Obama's speech. The crux was that government data was to be opened up to the public, without having to go through the channels and request things under the Freedom Of Information Act!

I don't know about YOU, comrade, but I think free information and a freer society is more important than just the use of a free file format.