The Sun BabelFish Blog

Don't panic !

Wednesday May 03, 2006

Open Document is now an International Standard

The Open Document Format has been accepted by the ISO standards organisation as ISO 26300.

In Simon Phipp's excellent words:

We can now draw a base-line across the productivity tools market and tell our suppliers we will not tolerate further competition and lock-in below that line. Innovation above that line is desirable - expected, even - but attempts to force upgrade, lock out competition, control my own use of my own data, are all now unacceptable. We have the tools of freedom in our hands. Time to use them.

Dig It!

The fact is that the format is allready widely used by Open Office (a full blown office suite that I have had no trouble working with over the past year), Koffice, NeoOffice, AbiWord, IBM Workplace Client and others. The question to ask now is: why would a vendor create another format, when this one allready exists, and given the huge cost and effort it takes to put something this comprehensive together, and the even larger cost to maintain it? So Apple, when is Pages going to support Open Document?

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