OpenDocument Alliance to Fight Digital Dark Age

OSS_ilation writes "A consortium of vendors and academic institutions -- including IBM, Sun Microsystems and the American Library Association -- has announced today that they are forming the OpenDocument Alliance as part of an effort to promote open file standards worldwide. The group will support the one truly open standard file format, OpenDocument, which is an XML-based file format used saving and exchanging editable office documents such as text documents, spreadsheets and presentations. Sun's Simon Phipps said he believed ODF would allow future generations to view all of today's digital docs and prevent a digital Dark Age from occurring."

Comments

I declare SHENANIGANS!

[Americano]

This PRESS RELEASE might as well be titled, "Sun, IBM, other disinterested parties seek to muscle in on lucrative government contracts using scare tactics."

Is there anybody here who, for a second, believes this is anything but a hypocritical attempt to use the same FUD tactics that Microsoft is so often accused of using against open source? I mean, perhaps there are benefits to the OpenDocument format, but come on... these people are not being motivated by some grand notion of "helping the little man." Sun, IBM, and others see a lot of dollar signs, and they're pushing their chosen format... just like MSFT does.

FTFA:

"This is not a partisan, anti-Microsoft group," said Simon Phipps of Sun.

Yeah, that's rich. I'm sure Sun & IBM are spending money creating OpenDocument implementations because they don't care about competing with MSFT's Office Suite.

I'd prefer it if they simply said, "We're competing with Microsoft, and we aim to win."