A pragmatic European approach to open standards (a must-read)

Tony Austin
Sunday, 09 November 2008 12:37

Opinion and Analysis

"In the meantime, ODF has been successfully implemented by a number of vendors and application developers. Implementations include OpenOffice; Star Office; Google Docs & Spreadsheets; K-Office; Scribus; Abiword; ajaxWrite; Zoho Writer; Ichitaro; IBM Lotus/Domino; IBM Workplace; Mobile Office; Gnumeric; Neo Office; Hancom Office."

"In other words: all of these applications use the same standard, ODF; all of them produce files with the extension .odt for text documents, .ods for spreadsheets and .odp for presentations; and these files can be opened, read and edited by either application implementing the ODF standard. This is interoperability at its best."

"Consequently, customers freely choose the applications based on look and feel, functionality, cost, or other criteria, without worrying about purchasing a specific, single-vendor software in order to work with their documents."

"ODF is gaining momentum in the public sector in Europe, Africa, Asia, South America and in a number of US states."

"In time, the format might enable a shift away from the current monopoly on the computer desktop. Government is an important customer and adopts open standards policies and practices for the same reasons as industry does: flexibility, choice and efficiency. ODF provides that choice and the public sector is better placed to benefit because of it."

High hopes, indeed! After all, we all know about Microsoft's strong position in the office document marketplace, and the wars over ODF versus Microsoft's OOXML (Open Office XML) proposal, which is now an Ecma standard.

They conclude: "Those who control a standard have market power. They set the digital rules of communication. To ensure competition in the software market, standards must be open and independent of suppliers. Open standards, such as ODF or PDF, have significant network effects. Governments will be the first to benefit, and Denmark and the Netherlands are already doing so. The move towards openness has only happened because enough key actors agreed this should happen, and the European public sector has led the way."

Because I was so struck by this excellent report, I have taken the liberty of quoting far more extensively than usual from it. I hope that I've whetted your appetite. There's a lot more of interest in it, so I strongly recommend that you download your own copy.

Here's the link again, for your convenience: The Momentum of Open Standards - a Pragmatic Approach to Software Interoperability

There are back issues of the European Journal of ePractice here.