OASIS Open Document Format for Office Applications Approved
May 4, 2005 1 Comment
OASIS has announced that the Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) v1.0 Specification has been approved. The OpenDocument format is intended to provide an open alternative to proprietary document formats including the popular DOC, XLS, and PPT formats used by Microsoft Office. I've covered the importance of Open Document formats before. The new standard will be the default in OpenOffice.org 2 and support is already in the latest Koffice beta. No word when/if Microsoft will support the standard, but they are an OASIS sponsor. Now that the spec is a standard, let's hope that we get some quick adoption, especially in Government. Using an Open Document standard has many advantages, most importantly allowing you guaranteed access to your data and avoiding vendor lockin.
–jeremy
Jeremy's Blog 
Hey Jeremy,
I don't know if you have been following the Massachusetts efforts on document standards for government offices and web sites etc. (there have been a number of articles on Groklaw on this specific subject) since they apparently seem to be accepting MS Word 2003 doc format which includes the secret MS XML Schema – and their current licence [of this MS patented software] appears, as far as I can see, to prohibit writing to this format unless you have a registered licence or have shucked out for a full blown copy of Word 2003 and the appropriate Windows OS. It doesn't sound to OPEN to me, OASIS or no OASIS.