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Open Document Foundation closes up shop (Linux-Watch)
At Linux-Watch, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols has a wrap-up of the rather bizarre Open Document Foundation tale. The Foundation came about to promote Open Document Format, but gradually became disenchanted with it, eventually switching to a W3C format on its way to shutting down. The article quotes from Andy Updegrove, ODF supporter and standards process watcher: "'What I think that Gary, Sam and Marbux are missing is that standards are, by definition, consensus tools. No one has to adopt them, so they have to work well enough for enough people that enough vendors actually implement them. Gary and company didn't get what they wanted, and decided to back another standard instead. There's nothing inappropriate about that, but there is something very unrealistic, as I doubt anyone sees CDF the way they do. Standards are one string that you can't push, unless you've got monopoly power--and needless to say, that they don't have.'"
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several journalists, including LWN, fell into the same trap... Posted Nov 12, 2007 19:00 UTC (Mon) by stevenj (guest, #421) [Link] ...of giving undue weight to the antics of a three-person "Foundation" that does not represent a significant portion of OpenDocument users, developers, or investors. The person to really call the Foundation out on this was Rob Weir of IBM in his blog a month ago.Just a couple of weeks ago, a LWN article cited a news.com article on the Foundation to argue that "the level of criticism of this format [OpenDocument] is growing" and to prop up the straw man that "OpenDocument is not the final answer to document formats." It's amazing to see the power of a name, and how much press you can get by calling yourself a "Foundation" and publishing some incendiary opinions. Of course it, helps that Microsoft finds the Foundation very useful, and pretends to take it seriously in order to support their attacks on OpenDocument.
several journalists, including LWN, fell into the same trap... Posted Nov 12, 2007 23:07 UTC (Mon) by sbergman27 (guest, #10767) [Link] Indeed. My understanding is that members of the Open Document Foundation, which represents only 3 (very vocal) people, were ejected from OASIS for being obnoxious. And my perception, now, is that those 3 people are experiencing a severe case of sour grapes.
several journalists, including LWN, fell into the same trap... Posted Nov 15, 2007 9:48 UTC (Thu) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link] Reading between the lines the crown jewel of the ODF Foundation was an ODF import/export filter for Office that: they didn't want to share with anyone else (wanted to make money out of it) plugged deep into MS Office internals (so pretty useless for anyone pushing alternative OSes or office suites, and dependant on MS not locking these internals later) required changes in ODF specification (they got told in ODF TC meetings how to approximate some ODF features in the internal Office model they discovered, but they wanted more than that: limit ODF so current Office could handle it) Basically they found themselves a sweet business model selling Office ODF addons as long as MS tolerated them, proposed big changes that would have made their life easier at the expense of limiting the ODF spec, and got predictably ignored by the MS competitors working in the ODF TC.
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