On Monday there was what seems to me like a major news story: the announcement that OpenDocument 1.0 has been approved as an OASIS Standard. As I’ve said before, OpenDocument is almost exactly what we had in mind when we built XML, starting back in 1996. Right now, it is the only XML office document format that is standardized, and it is also the only one that is complete; Microsoft’s offering is full of holes, starting with the absence of PowerPoint. It’s also completely 100% free of intellectual-property issues, anyone can use it for anything anytime anywhere without asking anyone first. Let me put it this way: if you occasionally create documents or spreadsheets or presentations, and if you think that you’d like to own them, independent of your Office software vendor, well, you have exactly one choice: OpenDocument. If those docs/spreadsheets/presos might be long-lived, or contain high-value data that you might want to re-use later, and you don’t use OpenDocument, well there’s a word for that but I’m not going to put it up on the front page at ongoing. By the way, at the request of our friends in the European Commission, we’ve committed to getting behind making OpenDocument an ISO Standard, too.
