Bob Sutor: ODF is the Future
IBM employee and blogger Bob Sutor has been a strong champion of ODF and he weighs in this week on the victory at ISO with OOXML, the past. ODF, the future.
“Congratulations to all who worked to secure this result in the goal of high quality, non-vendor dictated open standards. The story is not over, of course, as the Ballot Resolution Meeting in February will attempt to get agreement on fixes to OOXML to make it acceptable. A lot will happen between now and then. Nevertheless, this was a truly historic vote and result.
But that was so yesterday.
What about tomorrow? Well, for starters, I predict we’ll see even more adoption of ODF by governments, large and small; by users, young and old; and organizations, both commercial and non-profit. We’ll see more active development and evolution of ODF within OASIS and all are welcome to participate in that. We especially invite Microsoft and others to lend their expertise to this important standardization effort.”
The ODF camp has always offered this olive branch to Microsoft, and even now offers them the chance to work together. What kind of corporate arrogance can have a company follow the path that Microsoft has with its recent MSOOXML efforts? Trying to hijack the international standards setting process to control it, when a perfectly usable, technically elegant, and completely apolitical format, ODF, is already available? It just does not make sense!
Cheers to Sutor and the entire world of ODF supporters for heading off this challenge and for the honest and fair way they have behaved through every step of it.