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:Can I load it in Word?

[tttonyyy]

The survival of the wild salmon stock depends on these brave fish to face the torrents and rapids and emerge beaten and worn in the quiet streams of the Pacific Northwest.

If slashdot had a Bayesian spam filter, its eyes would be bleeding after reading your post.

Standards are good. Just look at MPEG and DVB - now broadcast standards. Complying with a standard delivers interoperability, but that is only useful if you're not the monopoly market leader. It's probably in Microsoft's interest to NOT adopt OD import/export, otherwise they'd be shooting themselves in the foot - at least at the moment. That doesn't stop it being a Good Thing (tm) for all other products though, open source or otherwise. Wide adoption by competing products will be the only way to change Microsoft's position. And given their history of compliance with standards *cough* W3C *cough* I wouldn't hold my breath anyway...

Re:Bah, use TeX :-)

[MountainMan101]

While you wrote your preamble.tex I typed my letter, printed a label for the envelope, put a stamp on it and put it in the post box. Then I got back and made a cup of tea, played minesweeper, got a new high score. By which time you'd compiled the latex document.

But seriously, I use OpenOffice most of the time, but last year I wrote my 300 page thesis in LaTeX. I would always advocate LaTeX for large/complex documents. Each has their place. Hopefully Open Document, and it's common implementation in applications that also have PDF export (eg OOo), will lead to people using it correctly, ie Open Document for collaboration and PDF for sharing.

Cool... now make it part of another standard

[Gunfighter]

Now that it's an ISO standard, perhaps the ISO would be so kind as to make its use part of one of those big compliance standards. This way, companies that want to be ISO 31337 (or whatever number they're up to now) compliant will have to use ODF as their primary means of storing and transmitting documents. After all, what's the use of a new standard if nobody feels compelled to use it? In addition to encouraging the use of open formats, it will give companies a reason to explore their options as far as office automation software.

Let's see some mass migrations from MS Office to OpenOffice.org and other such Open Source office suites. A few large corporations making the switch will produce case studies and some of those nifty ROI projections the suits always drool over. A snowball effect would be nice. One company makes the move and triggers a chain reaction in all of their vendors, suppliers, distributors, subsidiaries, etc. etc.

Re:Cool... now make it part of another standard

[Bert64]

OpenDocument is not a platform, it's a method of storing data.
Having open and documented standards for storing data is ESSENTIAL, and absoloutely should be mandated if necessary. Where would we be if, instead of SATA/IDE/SCSI and CDs, every PC manufacturer used a proprietary type of hard drive and a proprietary form of removable media?

Just because the format is dictated, doesnt place any restriction on what you can use to manipulate the data, so long as it conforms to the standard. I can put my SATA drive into any system that supports SATA, which is just about every modern computer from any vendor.

And just because a standard exists, doesn't mean it will always remain the same, as time progresses new versions will come out (IDE -> SATA) that bring improvements, most software will continue supporting both formats until pretty much everyone has caught up and the new standard takes over.

I can still plug an ancient 20MB IDE drive into a modern PC, and have it work.

Standard but less avaiable

[YGingras]

Now we know that the draft is obsolete and we have to page a huge bundle to d/l the PDF. What do we gain from that? Is this really operational costs? Why can IETF and W3C publish electronic versions free of charges and ISO can't? I'd rather have an OASIS semi-standard than an ISO standard that most can't afford to see.

Re:Hmmm

[cp.tar]

bloated shitpiece sold as OD.

Value judgements aside, what do you mean by sold?

Re:Hmmm

[Bert64]

However this is a format that's not yet deployed, anywhere...
It can also have proprietary extensions, and you can be sure it will in short order... And finally, is covered by patents.