OpenDocument Foundation To Drop ODF

poet sends us to Computerworld for a story on the intention of the OpenDocument Foundation to drop support for Open Document Format, OASIS and ISO standards not withstanding, in favor of the Compound Documents Format being promoted by the W3C. The foundation's director of business affairs, Sam Hiser, dropped this bomb in a blog posting a couple of weeks ago. Hiser believes CDF has a better shot at compatibility with Microsoft's OOXML, and says that the foundation has been disappointed with the direction of ODF over the last year.

Comments

Instability

[dotancohen]

It's instability like this that usually plagues proprietary software, not open source software. Even if they no longer endorse odf, programs like Abiword, Open Office, and Koffice should still support it. That's the future-proofness of FOSS. In fact, it was stupid, arbitrary changes like this that drove me from MS Office to OOo in the first place, way before I discovered Linux.

While this decision will only hurt them, I do not think that it will undermine the value of odf, nor will it have governments such as South Africa rethink their open source strategies.

This is Sun's Fault

[harlows_monkeys]

Blame Sun for this. With a few small additions, ODF could have supported Office formats as well, but Sun would not allow this. Their policy is that ODF will support what is needed for StarOffice, and nothing more. They control the ODF technical committee, and their patent license allows them to stop the ODF TC if the ODF TC goes in a direction Sun does not like.

They did the same thing with Java. If they had let people implement Java as an ordinary language, with platform-specific features, so that I could have used Java instead of C on Windows or Mac for writing Windows or Mac apps, when I want to take advantage of the specific platform, and still have used Java for portable apps when I didn't need platform-specific stuff, Java would have become one of the main languages for application programming for desktop systems. But Sun decided that it must remain pure, and only be usable for the kind of things they wanted it used for (writing portable code), and so we all had to write our non-portable apps in C, and it was usually easier to just write our portable apps in C, too, and use #ifdefs to deal with different platforms, and Java became insignificant on the desktop.

Part of being "open" means letting people do things that you might not like, such as interoperate with Word, or write Mac programs that use Mac features in Java. Sun needs to realize this, and let us use their interesting technology without telling us HOW we have to use it.