It’s been a tumultous couple of months in the war over office document formats, and things are only just getting started.

Here’s a summary of what’s been, and what I think it all means.

Office Document Format Wars Part IV: A New Hope - The Rebellion against the Empire

It all started a long time ago (September) in a land far, far away (United States), when the state of Massachusetts decided that it would be a sensible thing to stop killing Jedi, and that documents created and managed by the various government departments should be stored in an open, non-proprietary format. Their main concern was that in using a proprietary format for storing their documents, they would effectively locked into that format, since they had no control over the documents and their continuing ability to work with them and manipulate them. Indeed, if they subsequently chose to change vendors, they would be stuck with many documents that could not be used without maintaining licensing for the existing vendor.

Makes sense to me!

The state of Massachusetts decided that the only sensible thing to do would be to mandate the use of an open document format, and they chose the OASIS standard OpenDocument, also known as “OpenDocument format”, also known as “ODF”, also known as the “OASIS Open Document Format for Office Applications”.

It’s like - you’ve got all the plans for the top secret space station capable of destroying an entire planet. But you’ve decided that the holographic storage technique originally sold to Lord Tyrannus by the InterGalactic Banking Clan is not really suitable for your purposes anymore. You want to update it to something that the cheap foreign contractors building your space station will be able to read as well, given they are using low cost, open source datapads.

So, naturally Massachusetts’s decision cause quite a stir on the holonet.

Cover Pages (OASIS): Massachusetts Supports OASIS OpenDocument … - has a good overview of the requirements by Massachusetts, plus a very good bibliography with supporting information, including press and commentary on the decision.

Wikipedia has a really good overview of the format and some of the discussions about the debate … OpenDocument

Groklaw is also generally excellent for discussions of this nature.

One of the most comprehensive sources of information on the whole issue has been Bob Sutor, Vice President of Standards and Open Source for the IBM Corporation - who has had a running commentary on the decision …

… and then at this point things really start to get interesting !!!!!

I’ll continue in the next installment … Office Document Format Wars Part V: The Empire Strikes Back