Laura's Box of Chocolates

ODF, Open Standards and Open Source...
The natural convergence of standards and open source is really taking shape with today's news: the ODF Alliance. 30+ companies, associations, universities and government agencies are getting behind the ODF. And yes, Massachussetts has not buckled. They are there supporting the alliance as well. (John Adams would be so proud!)

It's just too simple a concept ...and as usual, the more basic the concept, the more difficult it is to accomplish.  

It's about "a truly open standard file format that can be implemented by numerous and varied applications". ODF would enable governments and their constituents to use, access and store critical documents, records and information *independent of the applications or enterprise platforms used for their creation or future access*.

So this varied group is endorsing and suggesting the adoption of the OpenDocument Format (ODF), an open XML-based collection of office document formats, including text, presentation and spreadsheet formats. This approach will make it possible to retrieve information and exchange of documents between different applications, agencies and/or business partners ANYWHERE, ANYTIME on ANYTHING.

Sounds like Freedom to me.

Seems that Open Standards and Open Source are natural buddies. I'm figuring out that Open Source being FREE doesn't mean anarchy. Standards are a good thing--we have some standards focus in the OpenSolaris community of course, with an ISO standard being submitted by a community member. And of course, all the open standards originally in the Solaris code base that was open sourced on June 14 2005 to start up OpenSolaris.org are in force. 

It's a prelude to something better.

LKR


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