OpenOffice.org today turned the software industry on its head by opening up its most valuable technology for others to use – including its competitors. Last year, in a landmark decision, the International Organization for Standardization adopted the OpenDocument Format used by OpenOffice.org as the international standard ISO/IEC 26300 for office data.  This gave OpenOffice.org a key advantage over arch-rival Microsoft, particularly with governments, public bodies, and regulated companies concerned about long term data access (such as pharmaceuticals, financial services, etc).

With today’s announcement of the creation of an ODF Toolkit Project, OpenOffice.org is encouraging other software developers to join in, use, and enhance the code which OpenOffice.org has developed to use OpenDocument Format. At a time when the software industry is plagued by corporations spending millions of dollars defending their real or imagined “intellectual property”, this is a huge vote of faith in the alternative “free software” model, which has already given the world software of the highest quality such as the Firefox browser and the Linux operating system, as well as OpenOffice.org itself.

It also marks a departure for OpenOffice.org, which rose to prominence as the developer of the OpenOffice.org office productivity suite – the free alternative to Microsoft’s Office product. OpenOffice.org is now repositioning itself as a centre of excellence for freely-available office software component technology. These software building blocks are currently used to build the well-known OpenOffice.org productivity suite, but can also be used by developers to create other innovative applications. Why re-invent when you can re-use?

Developers and others interested in joining in this exciting project are encouraged to visit the ODF Toolkit Project for more information and details of how to participate.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 23rd, 2007 at 4:00 pm and is filed under OpenDocument, OpenOffice.org. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.