eWeek: “ODF: The Better, More Affordable Office Standard”
Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols writes ODF: The Better, More Affordable Office Standard for eWeek.
Vaughan-Nichols writes, “If you take a close look, as many people have, it’s clear that ODF, and not Open XML, is the better document standard.”
He also rounds up some good quotes from other sources, including this one:
“Dr. Manon Ress, a director at the CPTech (Consumer Project on Technology), a Washington, DC-based non-profit created about 20 years ago by Ralph Nader, sees ODF as a major consumer issue.
In her blog, Ress wrote, “What’s at stake? If we compare what is going on with the monopoly on word processing to the openness, creativity and innovation in the field of authoring tools for the web, it becomes clear that we could see important changes if ODF becomes the mandated standard.”
Vaughan-Nichols continues, with this interesting endorsement from a number of library consortia:
“In a recent letter to the Massachusetts government, a coalition of American Association of Law Libraries, the American Library Association, the Association of Research Libraries, the Medical Library Association and the Special Libraries Association, wrote, “documents in relatively long-term storage such as the hard drives of servers can be read only by programs that have backwards compatibility… documents created in ODF will remain accessible in the future because any programmer will be able to find its open, nonproprietary specifications.”