Summary: A lot of ODF news and some leading developments from Malaysia

QUITE a few things have been happening in "ODF world" and this is just a concise summary.

Jomar Silva was one among many people who passed on the message that says: "ODF has been signed in as Malaysian Standard [MS] (announcement coming soon). PDF will be MS soon as well." People are happy because they understand the importance of ODF.

Malaysia is no stranger to ODF and the government there uses OpenOffice.org in many places. We wrote about Malaysia and the international document standard (ODF) in:

• Malaysia Saves with Free Software and ODF, Europe Rises Against Microsoft
• Malaysia Turns to OpenDocument Format and Deployments Begin
• OpenDocument Format Wins in Malaysia
• Malaysia Wants a Truly Open Document Format and So Does New York State
• ODF Op-Eds from South Africa, Malaysia
• OOXML: What Really Happens in Malaysia
• Microsoft Insults the Intelligence of Malaysians, Choice of ODF
• Microsoft Still Contaminates Malaysian Press for OOXML Publicity
• Quote of the Day: What Microsoft Did in Malaysia
• Microsoft Goes Lobbying Against OpenDocument Format in Malaysia
• Malaysia looks at OOXML (and it doesn't like what it sees)
• Does Microsoft Buy Organic OOXML 'Support' in Malaysia?

In Holland too there is a push for ODF (in Dutch), which is a vital part of the country's move to Free software in government.

Bart Hanssens is preparing a presentation on ODF signatures and helps in preparing the ODF Plugfest, not just ODF itself (see the OASIS Web site. Dennis Hamilton too is involved in the process).

Michael Brauer and Rob Weir are still at the forefront of ODF and this includes activities like presentations.

Bob Sutor writes about the OpenOffice.org 2009 Conference, which is coming soon (November third). There are other other noteworthy events that cover ODF, mostly those that involve Free software. Regarding the OpenOffice.org 2009 Conference, here is a new blog post:

The OpenOffice.org conference will start in a few days. It's high time to prepare for the stay - e.g. by consuming Italian style food and delicious coffee specialties. Today, I've added the second entry in my little series of "OOo logo interpretations": Two cappuccino and one espresso, per favore! :-)

Many new programs claim ODF support. Here for example is another Mac program that claims support of ODF. It's called Nisus Writer Pro. We are finding ODF support also here in phpMyAdmin and in AbiWord, which has a brand new release that targets not only low-capacity PCs. At Linux Crunch there is this new preview of OpenOffice 3.2, which may be more suitable for computers with high specifications (thus the importance of choice and diversity unified by open standards).

Finally, the release date for OOo 3.2 is expected to be on 14 December 2009. You can download the Development version from here. Remember, it is not the final version, so it might have some bugs. Help developers to kill them by reporting about them in OpenOffice.org's bugs system. Any comment is more than welcome.

Google Docs enables exporting documents and spreadsheets as ODF.

With no fanfare or as much as an official announcement, Google has taken an important step in making users' Google Docs more open and portable.

It turns out that RedOffice now has a GNU/Linux port which is still experimental.

The application, or should I say a set of applications, I got so fascinated with, is in a nutshell an OpenOffice derivative, created by a Chinese company responsible for RedFlag Linux distro. The application suite is called: RedOffice and you can get an experimental Linux version here: http://202.10.78.132/download/RO45StandardForLinuxPre.tar !!!Beware!!! the application is a beta, and is not really free (though I can't be too sure as I don't read Chinese).

Bob Sutor and several others have begun drawing attention to Rob Weir's latest post, which Groklaw addressed in detail.

Rob Weir has an eye-opening report on how the Microsoft-stuffed committee implementing fixes to OOXML is extending the "standard", which turns out to be not exactly standard, to better conform to Microsoft Office 2007, and without following usual procedures. That is utterly backwards. Normally, vendors work to make their products conform to the standard, and it's very unusual for a "standard" to be made to conform to one vendor's proprietary product. I want to reproduce the article here, because it is an object lesson, a timely one.

After corrupting ISO for OOXML, Mirosoft employees try to befriend pro-ODF people who still stand in Microsoft's way, but it's not working out. Microsoft should first support ODF, properly [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]. ⬆