OpenDocument Format Alliance Announced

According to the New York Times, 30 companies, trade groups, academic institutions and professional organizations have formed the OpenDocument Format Alliance, whose goal is to promote and advance the use of the OpenDocument Format (ODF).

According to the Alliance web site, the OpenDocument Format (ODF) is “an open XML-based document file format for saving and exchanging editable office documents (including memos, reports, and books), spreadsheets, charts, and presentations. OpenDocument was developed as an application-independent file format by Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS), a vendor-neutral standards organization. OASIS submitted the OpenDocument Format specification to the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) on 30 September 2005 for ratification. This process is presently ongoing.”

“The ODF specification is advanced by OASIS, and is a genuine vendor-neutral, open standard specification,” the Alliance says. “It is available for implementation and use free of any licensing, royalty payments, or other restrictions. ODF has been an approved OASIS standard since May 2005, and has been implemented by multiple vendors in a variety of products. Further, the ODF specification is available for use by any developer, including proprietary software vendors as well as open source developers.”

According to an article in eWeek, Microsoft is none-too-happy about these developments.

“The alliance—whose supporters include many of Microsoft’s Linux and open-source foes such as Corel, IBM, Novell, OpenOffice.org, Opera Software, Oracle, Red Hat and Sun Microsystems—is essentially positioning the XML-based ODF (OpenDocument Format) as the alternative to other document formats like Microsoft’s OpenXML, the new file format that will be used in Office 2007 when it ships later this year,” eWeek reports.

According to a report in InfoWorld, part of what makes the OpenDocument Format attractive is the promise that “files using the format can be opened by any application that supports OpenDocument, giving users more choices of office software. Some open-source software suites already support the format as do Sun Microsystems’s StarOffice and IBM’s Workplace.”