In the last two years, there has been a wealth of material on the web about the OpenDocument Format (ODF), an OASIS and ISO open standard for document interchange that was designed for interoperability among systems independently developed to run on multiple operating platforms. In short, ODF levels the document playing field, will rapidly allow new players to enter the market, drive innovation, and lower costs for organizations, individuals, and governments around the world. It’s good for citizens, consumers, CIOs, and CFOs.
ODF challenges the status quo of having a format for commonly used information dictated by a single company simply because its, and likely only its, software applications completely implement it. It is available royalty-free and was developed in a transparent way by independent experts from around the world. Its development is continuing in OASIS in order to provide state-of-the-art provisions for such areas as accessibility.
As I’ve said before, ODF represents the future and is a paradigm for the development of future open standards. Particularly in contrast with OOXML, it is a model for how a community can pull together, throw in their various significant technical contributions, take a reasonable yet measured amount of time to develop a standard independent of a single vendor’s product release schedule, and change the entire software industry in the process. Prediction: the future history of software and standards will have ODF as a major game-changing milestone.
Here are some great resources to learn more about ODF:
- The OpenDocument Fellowship
- The ODF Alliance: members, resources, newsletters.
- OASIS OpenDocument Format (ODF) Adoption TC
If any of these strike your interest, I encourage you to join or otherwise support them.
For IBM, ISO26300 (and therefore http://www.openoffice.org/ ) actually plays out against IBM Lotus SmartSuite in the same way that Linux (e.g. http://shipit.ubuntulinux.org/ ) played out against IBM OS/2.
I joke about the Lotus SmartSuite salesman on quota to sell a hundred thousand in a given quarter, the first and only customer coming in with an order for one, and the salesman thinking what his sales manager will say, deciding he might as well be hung for a sheep as for a lamb, declining to sell the IBM product, and recommending that the customer go look at something ISO26300-compliant such as OpenOffice.org . But surely it’s not too far from the truth.
Lotus SmartSuite must either be developed to be ISO26300-compliant (which will take IBM investment dollars); left as-is to take a rapidly declining revenue stream; sold off, resulting in a presumably-modest lump sum; or open-sourced. And someone (thankfully not me) is going to have to decide which of those is in the best interest of IBM. Whichever is chosen, I’m sure existing customers will have their warranties honoured.
I believe some copies of Lotus SmartSuite do currently go out on the Lenovo preloads (IBM Lotus SmartSuite for Microsoft Windows Vista, of course), so it’s going to give Lenovo a choice. Do they offer OpenOffice.org on their Personal Computers ? Or do they offer a 60-day free trial of Microsoft Office ? Or both ?
Linux and OpenOffice.org are essentially non-products. You can tell that they aren’t products because they don’t have prices and they don’t have warranties.
They are ‘collaboratively-developed tools’. A global ‘brains trust’ of scientists, engineers, academic professionals, and students, getting together across the Internet and saying ‘what can we make, and what standards shall it conform to’.
POSIX, X11, OpenGL, TCP/IP, and now ISO26300 are the answer to the ’standards’ questions. The ‘global brains trust’ is happy; it has its foundations rock-solid now, and it’s building on them.
Now, what assorted US and non-US corporations do about it is their business, of course. There’s loads of new stuff to do, new business areas to plant investment dollars into with a view to growing profitable revenue streams.
I don’t think it affects IBM a lot; OS/2 and SmartSuite are fully harvested and ploughed under, and new businesses have taken over.
Which is partly why I for one have argued and asked – begged at times might be the more appropriate word – that IBM hand the products – OS/2 and Lotus SmartSuite – off to the communities that just _won’t_ _let_ _go_ of them. In Source Code form, of course, and with an OSI-approved license.
It’s part and parcel of being a good FOSS citizen – finding the most appropriate recipients for the project/s you are no longer interested in maintaining, as long as there is a definable community built up around it.
The SmartSuite community could provide themselves with the ODF customization, and the OS/2 community could implement a multiple input queue – which was one of the things that OS/2 was slammed for lacking in the early nineties.