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But behind the scenes, things are not quite as rosy. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts, which lived up to its left-leaning credentials (didn't Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer famously upbraid open-source proponents for being Communists?) broke important ground by mandating that state agencies switch to open-source platforms. There's just one problem: They can't seem to manage the transition. Sources close to the situation tell me that former state CIO Peter Quinn's resignation happened at least in part because of delaying tactics by vendors who publicly support open source but do their best to scuttle it behind the scenes.

Adding a twist to a high-stakes conflict over document formats, some advocates for OpenDocument, or ODF, are abandoning the standard in favor of the World Wide Web Consortium's Compound Document Formats standard. The reason? Technical limitations in sharing ODF files with Microsoft Office applications.

That said, it goes on to acknowledge that “there are standards which we are obliged to adopt for pragmatic reasons which do not necessarily fully conform to being open in all respects.

“By migrating from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice.org we had to take our productivity environment to a higher level, so that the migration would not be perceived as a mere replacement but as a genuine improvement. The OpenOffice.org user doesn’t need to leave the OpenOffice.org application or start another application. This effectively eliminates the borders between template management and document collaboration for teams, projects and departments. We are focused on the user and on the usability of the applications we use. With O3Spaces Workplace we’ve found a fully integrated document management, collaboration environment that till now couldn’t be found on the market”, says Hiemstra.

Microsoft's Kapoor says "Let the consumers decide what they want to use. Why thrust a standard on them?" On the issue of old file formats he says "Microsoft does support old formats and there is no reason why doubts are being raised in this area."

Did the OpenDocument Foundation recently shutter its doors for good because it was unable to convince Oasis to support its converter, known as Da Vinci? Or was it because OpenDocument Format was simply not designed for the conversion of Microsoft Office documents, applications, and processes?

But standards don't rule the computing world. Today, ninety-two per cent of desktops and seventy per cent of servers run the proprietary and non-standardized Microsoft Windows OS.

XML expert, consultant and Microsoft MVP Don Demsak argues that both technologies share a fundamental flaw-they're not really striving to be standards at all. "I think this whole OOXML versus ODF thing is a non-issue. Both formats are just serialization formats for the object models they're associated with, and are not designed as impartial, interoperable formats," Demsak writes in an e-mail. Gary Edwards, president of the OpenDocument Foundation, which drives ODF development, believes codified document standards should not carry forward old flaws and application nuances. "The world is not a clean slate, but it's going to somehow make that transition of existing documents, applications and processes to XML," he says in an e-mail. "To us, that is an open XML file format consistent with the continuing work of the W3C that also meets the following criteria: open, unencumbered, universally interoperable, totally application-platform-vendor independent, with an acceptable citizen-driven governance," Edwards writes.

Being XML, it should be easy to convert between the two formats."

To handle IP conflicts between open source and proprietary software organizations, Ballmer wants to see what he calls "an intellectual property interoperability framework between the two worlds." He did not give any specifics on what such a framework would look like.

+1 gary.edwards - 11/16/07 Thanks for the consideration Anton. You might want to follow an emerging discussion now taking place at the OpenDocument Fellowship: Interop between multiple standards and multiple applications Check on the follow up post and understand that this is the same problem the da Vinci group tried to overcome in Massachusetts, when ODF hung by a thread in the summer of 2006; with the sole hope being a plug-in conversion process capable of very high "round trip" fidelity. To assist Massachusetts and the da Vinci Group, the OpenDocument Foundation introduced to the OASIS ODF TC a series of discussions and proposals collectively known as the ODF iX interoperability enhancements. A total of six comprehensive iX enhancements were introduced between July of 2006 and March of 2007. The first three sets of iX enhancements were signed off on by CIO Louis Gutierrez, with the full knowledge and awareness of IBM (they participated directly in those discussions and i do have the emails and conference schedules to verify this . Also, if you're interested in other issues surrounding the da Vinci groups use of CDF WICD Full as an in-process conversion target for MSOffice documents, there is a series of recent responses posted in the comments section of this blog, "Going to Bed (without my supper). One last note; I do have a response to AlphaDog sitting in the blog que, where i try to put the MSOffice to CDF WICD Full conversion, and the OpenOffice ODF to CDF WICD Full conversion into the larger context of the web platform and universal interoperability. This post will also briefly explain the events immediately preceding the decision to shut the Foundation down. Hope this helps, ~ge~

But in serving as that "glue," the Foundation's founders had recently said they believed CDF could fulfill the original goals of the ODF format - goals they described as having been circumvented by their current backers, perhaps in the effort to keep OOXML from being considered an equal player. To that end, they established what had been called the da Vinci Project, whose stated goal was to build a better bridge between OOXML and ODF than Microsoft itself is working on, using CDF as a go-between.Today, the da Vinci Project appears dead, as its home pages on Google were also struck down.

But markets and governments understand that Open Document is the appropriate standard to replace the old Microsoft binary formats for office communication.

Editor's Note: This is the third in a series of articles that examine why the ODF Foundation closed down. The leaders of the recently shuttered OpenDocument Foundation have moved their attention and efforts away from the Open Document Format and towards the W3C's Compound Document Format, which they believe will be able to neutralize Microsoft Office by repurposing those documents.

Open Document Format The panel discussion will focus on a single question: what should the user community do, what actions should they take in light of competing Open Document Formats? Each of our industry experts will be asked to present their practical response.

The ongoing file format battle between proponents of the OpenDocument Format (ODF) and Microsoft's Office Open XML (OOXML) took a surprising turn lthis week, when a key ODF proponent announced that it intended to abandon the ISO-approved specification. The move by the OpenDocument Foundation comes less than two months after Microsoft lost a key ISO vote to approve OOXML as a standard.

Five years after it was formed specifically to promote OpenDocument Format as an alternative to Microsoft Office formats, those behind the Open Document Foundation are abandoning the OASIS- and ISO-approved document standard in favor of the World Wide Web Consortium’s Compound Document Format.

The OpenDocument Foundation has announced its plans to sever itself from participation in or further advocacy of its namesake office document format in favor of the World Wide Web Consortium's XHTML (Extensible HTML)-based Compound Document Format. Although the OpenDocument Foundation is a fairly small organization, the group sports a certain cachet that stems from the ODF-to-MS Office plug-in that the group announced--but did not release publicly--about a year and a half ago. At the heart of the rift between the Foundation and the rest of the ODF backers--led by Sun and IBM--lies a dispute over the proper strategy for achieving round-trip document fidelity between Microsoft Office and ODF-consuming applications, such as Sun's OpenOffice.org or IBM's Lotus Symphony.

In Belgium, for instance, the government is using plug-ins to enable Microsoft Office to read and save files in ODF, Marcich said. The same plug-ins are being used in Massachusetts, which was the first governmental body to move to ODF. One prominent ODF backer, the unrelated Open Document Foundation, said in late October that it would stop backing ODF in favor of a more viable universal format called the Compound Document Format (CDF). Marcich said that "won't have any effect on the alliance or on ODF" adoption. Moreover, CDF, which is a World Wide Web Consortium format, differs greatly in features and goals than ODF. "We're talking about apples and oranges here," he said.

A Savage Journey … ‘Erupting from my vivid nightmares into the retro 80s faded luxury of a five-star hotel in Geneva, the pictures of the first victim reappeared on the wall.  The head of the Brazilian delegation-it’s only a matter of time now. My mind thrashes to disentangle the thrown spaghetti threads of blurred reasoning; who’s next, is it just the heads of delegation they are after, any NB member, P-members only? The fog lifts and it’s worse.  Who is behind this, them or us?  We outnumber them, but maybe their plan is more devious.  Must find Bonky Bob, he’ll know what to do.’ Enough levity for now.  The BRM has held few surprises, other than the rather galling situation where I was forced to publicly toe the INCITS line by the temporary head of delegation, a Microsoft employee, against my better judgement.

4. The Reality in the Punchbowl Meanwhile, Sam Hiser offers a different impression of the DIN effort [4]: "The ODF-to-OOXML harmonization effort being hosted by the German standards group, DIN, is Europe's best effort to resolve our Mexican Standoff between Microsoft, Sun and IBM. Even though harmonization is laughably complex and will not work unless the applications are harmonized too, the best and brightest of Germany are left to hope for success."  [emphasis mine: dh] Although the mission of the German effort is translation (Übersetzung), not harmonization, I find there is a very important point that is not made often enough:  People write, read, and edit office documents with little, if any, understanding of the particular format that makes them persistent in digital form.  The XML-based open formats do not change that.   People adapt to the software/device they are using by trial and error.  We train ourselves to obtain the visible results that we want.  Different people obtain superficially similar results by quite different means.   Even when someone has gone to the trouble to create style sheets, forms, macros, templates and other format-impacting aids, it is very loosey-goosey in practice.  And it still does not require paying attention to the file format.