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20070124 Wednesday January 24, 2007

ODF Tookit Project

I do sympathise with the view that Stephen has about having too much news in one week, but in the midst of all the excitement of the Intel announcement and Sun's return to profitability, the OpenOffice.org community made a very important announcement yesterday that I'd like to point out to you.

It announced the ODF Toolkit Project, a community with the goal of creating shared software that both OpenOffice.org and other communities and developers can use to create applications that create and consume OpenDocument Format. Having an open source implementation of a standard like the OASIS-derived ISO/IEC 26300 is important becuase it provides the basis for the much faster proliferation of compatible support for the standard. Having that code be common to multiple open source and commercial projects is also important - it makes the burden for us all less while making the value for us all more.

While other formats seek only to be fully implemented once, having architecture-neutral componentry that implements ODF in this way will be a key to format freedom. Just say no to software standards with no open source implementation - those aren't standards, they are time-to-market barriers by their inventors.

This is very much in the spirit of the concept Rob Weir of IBM articulated a while back, and I very much hope they and many others will join together to make the project successful - the folks who voted "+1" to start the project are setting a great example. Sun is committed to the project, and you can read more about that from Sun's Juergen Schmidt.

Posted by webmink ( Jan 24 2007, 03:53:22 AM PST ) Permalink Comments [2]
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Comments:

Hey! Great news, both the Intel step and the ODF project news! I really hope they could help to break the Microsoft monopoly, not only offering solutions for the Server market, but also backing them up in the Corporate Desktop area (we just need an even easier J2EE stack to implement Desktop + remote applications). And the move of Vista, who ties in users and reduce their freedom makes me think that times is finally arrived for the FLOSS world :) You could not have chosen a better moment to release Java, which, I think, will play (with Sun) an important role in all this! Keep up with the good work!

Posted by neugens on January 24, 2007 at 04:22 AM PST #

It's a great news! The Italian Native-Lang Project is shortly going to deliver a press news about it. I take this chance to tell you we didn't get any feedback to our open letter and as you know we can't share yet the precious thesaurus resources created by our volunteers. Please, help..

Posted by Roberto Galoppini on January 24, 2007 at 08:11 AM PST #

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