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

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.