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.