Celebrating 20 Years of the OASIS Open Document Format
The Document Foundation is celebrating the 20th anniversary of the ratification of the Open Document Format (ODF) as an OASIS standard.
Two decades after its approval in 2005, ODF is the only open standard for office documents, promoting digital independence, interoperability and content transparency worldwide. [...]
To celebrate this milestone, from today The Document Foundation will be publishing a series of presentations and documents on its blog that illustrate the unique features of ODF, tracing its history from the development and standardisation process through the activities of the Technical Committee for the submission of version 1.3 to ISO and the standardisation of version 1.4.
Posted May 6, 2025 10:07 UTC (Tue)
by zoobab (guest, #9945)
[Link] (6 responses)
"Microsoft has compromised the International Standards Organisation (ISO) during the rush to get a stamp for their Office OpenXML (OOXML), using unfair practices such as committee stuffing in several countries and political interventions of ministers in the standardization process."
It's sad to see how our world is corrupt on so many levels.
Posted May 6, 2025 19:19 UTC (Tue)
by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
[Link] (5 responses)
Yes, yes, there are some dark corners with "behave like Office 97" settings. They are pretty much ignorable, as they can happen only when Office 97 documents are converted.
Posted May 7, 2025 3:50 UTC (Wed)
by raven667 (subscriber, #5198)
[Link] (4 responses)
Posted May 7, 2025 4:09 UTC (Wed)
by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
[Link]
Although after implementing the only open-source KMIP client, I really wish somebody would nuke OASIS from the orbit, just to be sure they don't make any new standards.
Posted May 12, 2025 17:43 UTC (Mon)
by khim (subscriber, #9252)
[Link] (2 responses)
Surprisingly enough no, it wasn't threat of ODF, but more of their own issues related to the fact that MS Office is not a product made for individuals, these days. They needed some buzzword-compliance and thus switched to XML, sure, but format was more-or-less stabilized since MS Office 97.
Posted May 12, 2025 20:58 UTC (Mon)
by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
[Link] (1 responses)
How many other products only changed their file formats because "MS Compatibility" forced it on them?
Cheers,
Posted May 12, 2025 21:09 UTC (Mon)
by khim (subscriber, #9252)
[Link]
It certainly wasn't. Before enterprise embraced Office almost every version got its own format. Office 95 was an exception that became the norm: it kept format compatible with Office 4.x to ensure success of Windows 95 – and sales people liked the idea of unchanging format of Office 95 so much that they caused a riot when Office 97 changed format, like was normal at the time. Office 97 have changed format, but 2000 and 2003 haven't changed it. And if you would look for any product you'll see that Office 97/2000/2003 is listed as one format already. Who cares? The fact is: MS Office froze it's format not because of ODF silly games, but because their new, enterprise, customers wanted frozen format. That happened 10 years before ODF and OOXML saga. And OOXML had zero input from anyone else, it was pure marketing, plain and simple XML is hot and we need XML format, let's create one. That (Microsoft creates new office as “a standard de facto”, the rest of the world follows approach) wasn't any different from what happened before or after…
Microsoft corruption
Microsoft corruption
Microsoft corruption
Microsoft corruption
> In a way it's a kind of success, ODF is fine but the threat of it forced MS to commit to a stable documented open file format for their products
Microsoft corruption
"This horrible experience was perfectly normal for state-of-the-art software. I kid you not."
Wol
> Except it wasn't normal.
"This horrible experience was perfectly normal for state-of-the-art software. I kid you not."