eWeek: “Sun Pushes for Greater Adoption of OpenDocument Format”
eWeek’s Peter Galli writes Sun Pushes for Greater Adoption of OpenDocument Format.
“Sun executives were unified in their call for all global governments, agencies as well as private enterprises, to adopt the ODF standard and, when asked why more in the public and private sector were not doing so, they said they were all closely watching the situation in Massachusetts.”
It seems crazy and inscrutable to me that anyone would oppose this move to the ODF standard, but a small number of people (most seem to have ties to Microsoft), actually do. Certainly, there is work in the short term to make this transition happen, but after that job is done, ODF will provide immense benefits all around.
A possible analogy is the world wide web, with its open HTML standard, compared to AOL’s information network that only permitted people and organizations to share their information with prior gatekeeper approval. Note how AOL’s network was surpassed and mostly swallowed by the growth of the web. AOL survived because it embraced this change, but there was a time when it seemed uncertain they would.
“Piper Cole, Sun’s vice president for global government and community affairs, said it is very important that government take a role in what is happening on the document standards front because they are strategic customers who can use their buying power to dictate that a multivendor baseline is created for file formats—just as Massachusetts has done.”