OpenDocument Now Published ISO Standard

bobibobi writes "After months of revisions, OpenDocument receives status of a full published standard. The various stages of a standard's "stage code are also online." The OpenDocument standard has been developed by a variety of organizations and is publicly accessible. This means it can be implemented into any system, be it free software/open source or a closed proprietary product, without royalties.

Comments

Re:Hmmm

[init100]

Who cares if the office-file-formats, highly efficient and thoroughly documented on MSDN...

You mean that the APIs for working with (MS) office files are well documented, not the formats themselves.

Re:The problem

[UnknowingFool]

The problem with those "standards" is that today this may be enough for all, but maybe tomorrow there will arise tasks for which the standards will not be good enough, or you will need to use many hacks to try to fit to the standards.

Yes like TCP/IP, ANSI/Unicode, HTML, CSS. You know those obsolete standards that nobody uses anymore. :P

Re:Microsoft?

[Anonymous Coward]

There are countries in this world where the government requires that all communication is in an open standard... You may be HP or Microsoft or Dell, if want to do sell them anything, you must send your docs in the requested format... if you don't they'll send it to /dev/nul...

Re:Can I load it in Word?

[flakier]

I continue to wonder why people here continue to view "The Open Source Community" and Microsoft as two opponents in some kind of imaginary war. There is no cabal; there is no war. MS does not care about ODF since it serves a different market and wishes only that ODF succeeds where it already is.

Re:Hmmm

[mackyrae]

bloated shitpiece sold as OD.
Do you even realise that .odt produces smaller files than .doc? My resume is 81.5 KB as a .doc and 17.5 KB as .odt. If you have a big file, you can be saving a few megabytes by using .odt.

Decades of formats

[mrchaotica]

Those big corporations with a billion dollar budget were using Word since decades. I don't see how that's going to change either.

No, they haven't! Most businesses have been using MS Word for one decade -- before that, they used WordPerfect. They actually switched due to a large effort on Microsoft's part to make Word read WordPerfect's format really well, while also being better software than WordPerfect. Software using OpenDocument could do the same thing, especially since it's actually a standard.

Companies have switched office software before; they can do so again.

Re:Decades of formats

[value_added]

No, they haven't! Most businesses have been using MS Word for one decade -- before that, they used WordPerfect. They actually switched due to a large effort on Microsoft's part to make Word read WordPerfect's format really well, while also being better software than WordPerfect. Software using OpenDocument could do the same thing, especially since it's actually a standard.

Actually, it's arguably less than that. The changeover started to happen around the time Win95 was introduced and accelerated as it became widespread, but many large corporations held off for several years. I wouldn't be surprised if any number of firms (particularly law firms) are still using WP.

Companies have switched office software before; they can do so again.

Let's hope so.

Re:Can I load it in Word?

[imroy]

MS does not care about ODF since it serves a different market and wishes only that ODF succeeds where it already is.

Right. And that's why Microsoft isn't spending money lobbying Massachusetts to "take away much of the ITD's power to make technology policy". It's not trying to "protect its wildly profitable Office software franchise against potential erosion by competing products that support ODF". Microsoft doesn't care about ODF, yeah right.