ODF * 2 and Open XML

Blogger: Peter O'Kelly

A timely reality check from Mary Jo Foley -- OpenDocument Foundation folds. Will Microsoft benefit?  Excerpt:

The OpenDocument Foundation — a group whose name and charter would lead one to believe that it was backing the OpenDocument Format (ODF), but which ended up backing a different document format instead — has closed its doors.

Sam Hiser, a systems consultant who was Vice President & Director Business Affairs at the OpenDocument Foundation, confirmed that ODF is closing its doors in a blog post on November 13. Hiser and a number of the other OpenDocument Foundation backers earlier this year decided to throw their weight behind a Worldwide Web Consortium document standard, the Compound DOcument Format (CDF), and back away from ODF.

Read Mary Jo Foley's full article for more details.

Coincidentally, I'm currently working on a Burton Group document on OpenDocument Format, Open XML, and related topics.  Some of my impressions:

1.  "OpenDocument Foundation" was an unfortunate name choice, due to the namespace collision (ODF = OpenDocument Foundation and OpenDocument Format; the latter is the name of the OASIS and ISO document format standard; the former is the name of a now-defunct group originally sponsored by OASIS that was chartered to help advance the use of OpenDocument Format).

2.  ODF (the OASIS-sponsored and subsequently abandoned group) went cold on ODF (the document format) after the standards group shepherding the model declined to incorporate some extensions recommended by the group -- extensions which would have, among other things, made it possible for OpenDocument-formatted documents to round-trip with Microsoft Office users in workflows without losing Office document metadata.

3.  ODF (the group) selected the W3C Compound Document Formats as its path forward, and announced it was no longer advocating ODF (the standard).

4.  A bunch of press channels picked up the "ODF abandons ODF" story and apparently didn't do sufficiently detailed homework on the charter/status/etc. of ODF the group.

There's a lot more to this topic -- stay tuned...

Comments

[Peter O'Kelly]

Hey Rob -- thanks for the comments. My post was based in part on an interview with Gary Edwards, one of the OpenDocument Foundation members. I should have been clearer on the fact that I was quoting his perspective on the extensibility dimension.