Slashdot Mirror
ODF Alliance Continues to Grow and Build Out
Andy Updegrove writes "As you may recall, a new organization called the ODF Alliance was formed on March 3 of this year to support the uptake of the OpenDocument Format (ODF) by governments. Yesterday, the ODF Alliance issued a press release announcing that it has more than tripled its membership to 138, has appointed a Managing Director with strong European experience (Marino Marcich), and is lobbying countries globally to vote for ODF in ISO. Overall, the picture is one of a growing organization that plans to be around for awhile, and particularly hopes to make its impact in Europe, from which a large number of its members have arrived, where governmental interest in ODF is highest, and risks to government CIOS therefore lowest."
Apple relies upon Microsoft making Mac software enormously, at least at present. The presence of Mac Office in the market place is a boon for Apple. One of the probable reasons for the current lack of a Spreadsheet in the iWork suite (which only includes Pages & Keynote) is an agreement between Microsoft and Apple.
OpenOffice.org also does not run natively on Mac OS X. There is a clunky X11 version which is slow and horrible. I've heard of Koffice running on OS X but not seen it working myself.
So, with no native applications using ODF on the Mac it's not surprising that Apple aren't a current supporter. I agree that AppleWorks and iWork should add on support for it in the future. I would be great to see an ODF framework released for the Mac that can translate between PDF/Quartz and ODF that would allow documents to be saved in and imported via ODF easliy for all applications in the future. This would be a huge boon for OS X, just like native support for PDF was to me when OS X was first released.