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Open Document Format Approved
An anonymous reader writes "The OASIS Group announces that the third Committee Draft [PDF] of the Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) v1.0 Specification has been approved
as an OASIS Standard. The submission of the approved standard can be found at here.
The OpenDocument format is intended to provide an open alternative to proprietary document formats including the popular DOC, XLS, and PPT formats used by Microsoft Office. Organizations and individuals that store their data in an open format avoid being locked in to a single software vendor, leaving them free to switch software if their current vendor goes out of business or changes their software or licensing terms to something less favorable."
The OpenDocument format is intended to provide an open alternative to proprietary document formats including the popular DOC, XLS, and PPT formats used by Microsoft Office. Organizations and individuals that store their data in an open format avoid being locked in to a single software vendor, leaving them free to switch software if their current vendor goes out of business or changes their software or licensing terms to something less favorable."
"Microsoft has such a strangle-hold over the most common document formats"
Everybody's not as dumb as Americans, and people in India, China, and South America have documents too. An open spec that doesn't live or die at the whim of an American corporation is awfully tempting to a lot of governments.
But the kicker on this is going to be backwards compatibility, something that Microsoft very carefully builds OUT of its products in order to drive their upgrade cycle. If the file format is spec'ed, you'll always be able to write to it, which means that trying to edit documents from today ten years from now won't be nearly as difficult as trying to edit documents from ten years ago today.