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."

Comments

Full list of members:

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

Full list of members can be found here (and FAQ here)

I note that Apple is not a member - I suggest all slashdotters write to Apple to support ODF & join this alliance. After all, Apple is no longer relying on MS for a browser - why rely on MS for an office suite?

Re:Full list of members:

[xirtam_work]

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.

The hard part

[SapphoComet]

The hard part will be keeping infighting to a minimum. Many times, organizations like this set out with great intentions and admirable goals, only to become very ineffective when infighting and internal empire-building take place.

Re:Any real interoperabilty?

[ZachPruckowski]

Why should they send a Word file to you and basically imply "Spend $300 on Word, and waste 300 MB of space on it."

Re:Any real interoperabilty?

[donaldm]

Well if enough people did this maybe business would realise that there are other document formats other than Microsoft's *.doc format (it is NOT a standard just something that has been erroneously accepted as one) and they better support it. Sometimes you just have to make a stand and I think this is what the EU is trying to do.

It never ceases to amaze me the lemming mentality of Business when it come to using propriety formats and how they seem to think that it allows for portability and interoperability (Biz talk) when that format is under the control (ie. Intellectual Property) of one company. What is even stranger is that format sometimes cannot even be read properly by the same companies software after a few years. So if you are part of a council, hall of records .... etc were they need to be able to keep documents for 100's of years then using something that has a closed format is a rather a stupid move, hence the need for an Open, Portable Document format.

Please look at the history of standards, get yourself in the right frame of mind before you do and it is quite fascinating, particularly when you relate it to today's society.

Yes I have worked in a Standards Laboratory hence my signature.