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ODF Toolkit Announced
Sweetshark writes "IBM and Sun joined at the 2008 OpenOffice.org conference in Beijing to announce the ODF Toolkit Union. The ODF Toolkit project will be independent of the development at OpenOffice.org, and will operate under the liberal Apache license. It goes from small tools that simplify using ODF in the software development process to large ODF Java and .NET libraries that can be used within other projects. 'The future of accessing and distributing software is here today,' said Michael Bemmer, senior director of Collaboration Engineering at Sun. 'It is no longer an acceptable business practice to have silos of office document data stored in proprietary formats. The industry has moved forward and is replacing the silos with business content, such as on-premise business applications, software solutions offered over the Internet and applications supported by mobile devices that are critical in Service Oriented Architectures.' Will this help ODF to make inroads in the business world after the successes on the desktops of users at home?"
Long answer: As long as there are PHBs who think "writing = Microsoft Word," good luck getting rid of DOC.
That answer is useless. The question, essentially, is, "Will this help people realize that Writing does not necessarily equal Microsoft Word?"
Only speak when it improves the silence.
Well yeah except you don't need Sun to open your jar. You can use Winrar to extract the info so it's not like it's a closed format.
In an ideal world, beating Word won't be necessary. Word itself isn't the enemy here. The enemy here is the notion that document format X must imply program Y(read .doc and word respectively). I don't care what word processor people feel like using. I do care what format the documents they send me are in.
In this case, the ODF Toolkit mentioned isn't a word processor at all, it's just a layer that makes it easy(er) for any sort of program to interact with ODF documents. Whether that means server side programs that parse information out of ODF formatted resumes that get uploaded, programs that generate ODF documents for various purposes based on database input, somebody's eccentric hobby word processor that needs to speak a standard format, whatever.
I'm not a huge fan of word, personally, and I'm very glad indeed that there are Free alternatives; but word isn't a big issue. Undocumented, badly documented, or deliberately obfuscated formats, that force us to all use a particular program just to communicate are the issue.