OpenDocument Format

"Standards always imply wide public access, an openness of the standard in both setting of the standard as well as access to the standard. It is therefore important to realise that an Open Standard would necessarily have to meet higher standards of openness than those provided by article 41 of document SCP/13/2. It is furthermore important to add that 'de facto standards' are typically not standards, but vendor-specific proprietary formats that were, as the secretariat correctly pointed out in the introduction to this discussion, 'strong enough to impose themselves on the market.' It is for this imposition on the market that 'de facto standards' are commonly used to describe monopolistic situations and corresponding absence of competition, which conflict with the basic purpose and function of standards."

"[W]e should all be pushing and saving documents as much as possible in the ODF file format. When you send a file out, you could send it in ODF, if the other person doesn't have it yet, then write yours in ODF, and then save later to another format, but send both pushing that person to ODF also (viral acceptance). Make ODF the default. Always import and work again in ODF."

Version 0.9 of this ODF Python library has been released * Updated to ODF 1.1. * A csv2ods program * The ability to load ODF 1.2 files * Online manual (though not complete)

'Cenatic, Spain's national resource centre on open source, next week is offering a two courses for software developers interested in the ODF-viewer for mobile phones that the centre has had developed last year."

OdtPHP is a PHP librairy designed to use OpenDocument file as a template for PHP."

"While you can create and save documents in the OpenDocument format using OpenOffice.org, KWord, or AbiWord, there are other ways to generate ODF files. odtwriter, for example, can help you to quickly convert plain text files formatted using reStructured Text markup into odt (OpenOffice.org Writer-compatible ODF) documents."

"Doug Mahugh of Microsoft is pushing inside the ODF Technical Committee for proprietary extensions, by which the monopolist vendor could embrace and extend the format to "innovate". "

Linus on standards