There is much rejoicing in the open-source community that the OpenDocument file format has been ratified by the International Organisation for Standardization as ISO 26300. This rather arcane news item is actually a milestone for the IT industry. For the first time, users of office software are guaranteed that they can get at their own data independent of the whims of software producers. With the rate of churn in software, this is a major development in ensuring today’s digital knowledge is not lost to future generations.

OpenOffice.org 2 is the first software to use the standard as its native file format, and as such is the de-facto reference implemntation of ISO 26300. Other open-source projects are adopting it too. It’s a sign of the interest in the market that third party software developers are rumoured to be racing to launch ODF convertors to sell as add-ins to MS-Office products.

As usual, the celebrations in standards community are somewhat marred by the people looking over their shoulders to Redmond, WA, and wondering how Microsoft will react. One camp believes that ISO 26300 is ‘our’ (i.e. the open-source community’s) property, and if its use becomes mandated by governments etc. it will strike a death blow against the Evil Empire. With this view of the world, open-source people should actively discourage Microsoft from supporting ISO 26300, and discourage MS-Office users from buying convertors.

I believe this is naive. If Microsoft finds it might lose business through not having an ISO approved file format – it will soon get one. Microsoft has demonstrated time and time again its ability to get initially hostile governments ‘on message’. A mere standards body will not be an issue for them. The world would then have two competing ‘standards’: one vendor controlled and with a dominant market share; one truly open with a minority market share. The IT industry would continue in the dark ages.

A standard is only useful if everyone uses it. This is too big a prize for the IT industry to lose. ODF proponents need to bend over backwards to encourage Microsoft to ‘rally to the standard’. Current users of ISO 26300 like OpenOffice.org need to work with Microsoft to ensure the standard meets Microsoft’s needs for office data storage. Together, all parties need to set up independent conformance testing to guarantee software products do work with the standard. The testing needs to be accessible not just to the Suns and IBMs of this world – but also the KOffices.

There’s enough to do there to keep everyone busy. Let’s see if the profession can rise to the challenge.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 9th, 2006 at 9:20 pm and is filed under OpenDocument. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.