“In a well-orchestrated PR bliltz, 36 Companies, associations, and end-users today announced the formation of the ODF Alliance. The ODF Alliance was first proposed by IBM at meeting of key players and others held at an IBM facility in Armonk on November 4 of last year, and has now been brought into existence under the wing of the Software and Information Industry Association.”
It is great to see this level of support behind ODF. With reputable companies such as IBM and Novell pushing forward on this issues it will be more difficult for governments to look the other way.
I hope that the group is successful in increasing uptake of the format. I think that it is important that we move towards open standards, especially for critical information such as government documents.
The Information Age is not much of one if we can’t access information.
RTF has been the easy governmental solution – if the need had really arised *politically*.
Simply put in governmental contracts that default save option must be *.rtf for text documents, eg.
Would have worked what, 10 years ago?
Anyway, wish the best for adoption of ODF as an open standard.
I wish they would push a open media standard too (i.e. ogg).
One step at at time.
Governments are about evolution, not revolution.
It is interesting to see that Corel has finally come out and joined the ODF side. After a lot of equivocation on their part, I thought that the MS influence on and in the company might force them to stay on the sidelines in return for a few crumbs from MS.
It is also interesting that a number of large corporations not previously associated with ODF support have joined the Alliance : Oracle, EDS and EMC.
On the other hand a couple of major corporations that were originally supporting ODF have dropped out and fallen in behind MS, namely Apple and Intel.
It is ironic to note that the ODF Alliance website:
http://www.odfalliance.org/news.asp
Is running on Windows 2003 Server and IIS/6.0 rather than one of the OS’s from members of the alliance which include AIX, Solaris, RHEL and SLES.
Edited 2006-03-03 16:14
With so many large corporations supporting this newly formed ODF Alliance, this can’t bode well with Microsoft. Their biggest criticism of the OpenDocument format was the fact that there is no standardization for spreadsheet formulae.
With the advent of OpenFormula:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenFormula
and all of these major companies pushing ODF, Microsoft has to be sweating a bit. I see many businesses realizing that Open Formats are the future and guarantee that they will be able to read the same document 20 years from now. Other solutions (Microsoft) force you to upgrade to new software with possibly incompatible document formats.
Open document standards are a way of “future-proofing” important data that needs to be retained for future usage. How long will it take Microsoft to ship ODF support in Office or someone to sell an export plugin?
“Open document standards are a way of “future-proofing” important data that needs to be retained for future usage. How long will it take Microsoft to ship ODF support in Office”
The longer Microsoft delay support for ODF, the more they can be accused of lacking interoperability and lacking a very important feature.