Why not just work with ODF? Creating competing open formats for the same thing does not make sense!

Groklaw reports that China is developing an open document format of its own. The good news is that it should be relatively similar to, and compatible with, ODF. The bad news is that there isn’t any good reason to fracture the market behind alternative open standards.

The most important task right now is to marginalize Microsoft’s proposed new format before it gains traction. If open format supporters do not rally behind one standard, the chance of blocking MS’ formats is greatly diminished. And if an open format does not win, competition and technical innovation will continue to be severely curtailed, as they have been under the MS Office hegemony.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 15th, 2006 at 12:55 pm and is filed under Free Culture, ODF, Open Source. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.