ODF Alliance, Who, What, Where (and Why?)

Andy Updegrove writes "On Friday, the new ODF Alliance was launched with much fanfare to 'educate government' about the OpenDocument Format. A flurry of brief news articles appeared the same day, based on pre-launch interviews (as well as an Op/Ed piece in the Wall Street Journal by Sun's Scott McNealy), but they didn't include much information. So what's it all about, why was it formed, and will it be likely to succeed? Given that the 36 members include only one government unit (the ICT department for Vienna), the answer is clearly to establish a beachhead in the government market as a target of opportunity, and then to expand from there to meet the real goals of the members."

Comments

ODF Alliance formed to support OpenDocument format

[all204]

Here is an other article on this: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060303-6313 .html It's a few days old though. (March 3rd)
Cheers!
~Allen

It does have backing...

[kebes]

If you RTFA, you'll see:
The ODF Alliance was first proposed by IBM...

If you look at the list of supporters, you'll see IBM, Sun, Novell, Red Hat, Oracle, etc. The open-document format does indeed have the backing of some big companies. The fact that MS doesn't want to support will slow adoption, but there is still a significant push for this format (as the very existence of this Alliance attests to).

Re:More standard formats

[kebes]

That's certainly worth worrying about. I'm not 100% sure here, but I think that the ODF will be administered in such a way that if you want to claim "OpenDocument compliant" on your product, you have to implement the standard fully and properly. Improper implementations can of course be produced (since the spec is openly published), but they will not be able to state/claim "OpenDocument compliant." (This can be protected with trademark law, etc.) It should be noted, however, that the standard clearly states that there will be no fees required to use it.

The OASIS faq states that "The OpenDocument format is owned by OASIS, a non-profit consortium dedicated to the open development of public XML standards." So I think they will use legal means to protect the "OpenDocument" format name from being mis-used, while allowing free implementation of the format by anyone desiring to do it properly.

Re:Office XML open enough?

[WhiteWolf666]

The difference is Office XML cannot be used in OpenSource applications.

Why? Although Microsoft grants you a license, you are not permitted to sublicense. As such, Office XML could never be used in a BSD or GPL, or any similar sublicensing Open Source scheme.

Also, ODF was established by a consortium of companies, is 100% unpatent encumbered, and will most likely become an ISO standard for document distribution in the near future.

Office XML is pretty open, but its not 100%. It's basically only usable by closed source projects, which is most likely Microsoft's intent.