Technology News: Applications: What's Holding OpenOffice Back?
The myths that ODF is an open standard, that Lotus Symphony is open source, and that Microsoft is the only company that manipulates "open" standards for unlawful competitive advantage continue to propagate.
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OpenDocument format gathers steam - CNET News.com
Martin LaMonica report of the 2005 ODF Summit Conference. Note IBM's plan to draft a proposal for the "OpenDocument Foundation."
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Microsoft, Intel join the ODF Technical Committee
The ODF TC home page just changed its list of "OASIS Sponsor-level members who have reperesentatives serving on this TC." Microsoft and Intel have just joined the ODF party. Let the party begin!
more fromwww.oasis-open.org
Publicly Available Standards
Most ISO and IEC standards are only available for purchase. However, a few are publicly available at no charge. ISO/IEC:26300-2006 is one of the latter and can be downloaded from this page in XHTML format. Note that the standards listed on the page are arranged numerically and the OpenDocument standard is very near the bottom of the page. This version of ODF is the only version that has the legal status of an international standard, making it eligible as a government procurement specification throughout all Member nations of the Agreement on Government Procurement.
more fromstandards.iso.org
Detail Results ISO/IEC FDIS 24754
"FDIS" stands for "final draft international standard," which puts this standard at the final voting stage. I suspect that this document will be frequently cited in the efforts to harmonize ODF and OOXML at the presentation layer. Unfortunately, it looks like you have to be a member of a national standardization body to come up with a copy.
more fromwww.nssn.org
BetaNews | Microsoft's Matusow and Mahugh on Office's move to open format support
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Is our idea of "Open Standards" good enough? Verifiable vendor-neutrality - O'Reilly XML Blog
In light of the Microsoft announcement of ODF support, a prescient July, 2007 blog article by Rick Jelliffe deserves revisiting. Jelliffe surveyed the pressure points for various players that he saw in the File Format War and made a set of suggestions that bear a remarkable resemblance to subsequent events. The goal he recommended for eGovernment and open standards advocates was to push to get ODF and OOXML out of the hands of Ecma and OASIS and into the hands of ISO for harmonization work, arguing that it is the most vendor-neutral eligible forum for such work.
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My take on why Microsoft finally decided to support ODF « Arnaud’s Open blog
IBM's Arnaud La Hors on why Microsoft should be blamed for what is inevitable given that ODF is not designed for interoperability and is not application-neutral. One might rationally fault Microsoft for not having joined the ODF TC earlier, but the ODF TC studiously avoided enabling interoperability even among ODF implementations and ODF has almost no mandatory conformity requirements, with application-specific extensions classified as conformant. The real ODF standard is the OOo code base controlled by Sun Microsystems. IBM played along with that game and cloned the OOo code base instead of fighting on the TC to make the myth of ODF interoperability come true. I don't see a lot of moral high ground for IBM here.
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Alliance Calls on Microsoft to Act on Its Commitment to Implement Support for ODF
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OpenOffice.org business manager John McCresh on ODF support in MS Office
There was a certain inevitability that Microsoft would be forced to bow to market pressures and announce its acceptance of ODF. However, Microsoft’s traditional approach to standards has been characterised as Embrace, Extend, Extinguish - i.e. attempt to claim ownership and take control of a standard through abuse of its near monopoly position.
Proponents of ODF need to defend against this by setting up independent testing for software conformance with the standard. The testing needs to be accessible not just to the Suns and IBMs of this world - but also the KOffices.
While proponents of ODF are celebrating that a victory has been won, it is more likely that the real battle is only just beginning.
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Rapid - Press Releases - EUROPA
The European Commission has taken note of Microsoft's announcement on 21st May concerning supporting ODF in Office. The Commission would welcome any step that Microsoft took towards genuine interoperability, more consumer choice and less vendor lock-in. In its ongoing antitrust investigation concerning interoperability with Microsoft Office (see MEMO/08/19), the Commission will investigate whether the announced support of ODF (OpenDocument format) in Office leads to better interoperability and allows consumers to process and exchange their documents with the software product of their choice.
more fromeuropa.eu
Microsoft Expands List of Formats Supported in Microsoft Office: Move enhances customer choice and interoperability with Microsoft’s flagship productivity suite.
Microsoft press announcement: REDMOND, Wash. — May 21, 2008 — Microsoft Corp. is offering customers greater choice and more flexibility among document formats, as well as creating additional opportunities for developer and competitors, by expanding the range of document formats supported in its flagship Office productivity suite.
more fromwww.microsoft.com
Doug Mahugh : Office support for document format standards
"This is a screen shot of a pre-release copy of SP2 (Service Pack 2) for the 2007 Microsoft Office System, showing the new document format standards that we'll be supporting starting with SP2."
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Gray Matter : Microsoft adds “Save as ODF” to Office 2007 Service Pack 2
Microsoft's Gray Knowlton on the reasons for the Redmond decision to provide native support for ODF 1.1. But most noteworthy, I think, is Knowlton's statement indicating that Microsoft aims at improving interop through best practices & patterns, i.e., application-level interop initiatives, as opposed to amending the ODF standard to specify conformity requirements essential to achieve interoperability, as required by JTC 1 Directives, international law, and antitrust law. In other words, big vendor negotiations around interop rather than giving software users and independent developers a seat at the table.
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