Just seen an article in ft.com Microsoft to give Office access to rivals. They are starting to get the message about open-standards, but have some way to go.

OpenOffice.org believes that the demand for a genuine open-standard format for office documents is now becoming overwhelming. Users of office software are acknowledging that their real investment lies not in the software itself, but in the spreadsheets, documents, databases, etc which they have created and represent their own intellectual property. The only way to guarantee access to this investment long term is for the data to be stored in a vendor-neutral open-standard format.

Microsoft’s announcement today that it recognises the market pressure for open-standard data formats is a welcome move. OpenOffice.org encourages Microsoft to adopt the existing OpenDocument standard, rather than create a new one. OpenDocument is approved by OASIS - the standards body for XML data formats in business, which is sponsored by all the leading names in IT, including Microsoft.

It is not certain yet whether Microsoft’s proposed format will meet the market’s criteria for an open-standard specification:

• the specification must be owned and maintained by a recognised standards body which is truly vendor neutral
• the specification must be capable of being adopted by any software vendor without restrictions
• Microsoft must issue an irrevocable covenant not to enforce any of its enforceable U.S. or foreign patents against any implementation of the specification

However, the fact that they are proposed to have their standard ‘validated’ by ECMA is not encouraging – ECMA are unlikely to require Microsoft to comply with the first of the conditions.

We may have to wait longer before the leopard really starts to change its spots

This entry was posted on Monday, November 21st, 2005 at 8:14 pm and is filed under Open-source, OpenDocument, OpenOffice.org. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.