--Bill Gates

An open industry forum has been created to maintain and promote an open source (LGPL v2.1) implmentation of Service Availability Forum high-availability middleware specifications. Founded by Emerson Network Power (ENP), Ericsson, HP, Nokia Siemens Networks, and Sun Microsystems, the OpenSAF Foundation aims to standardize high-availability middleware for Linux-based carrier-grade systems.

As you can see, no single company is responsible for founding the group. This is very similar to what you find on ODF and very different from OOXML, which is a case of a single company with paid members rallying around it.

One sound of alarm comes from the Don of Free Software Magazine, who reminds us to abstain from touching OOXML because we already have one international standard. It's called ODF.

Microsoft proposed a bogus Office file format while an ISO standard already existed. Their shady practices to get their format fast-tracked and approved by ISO didn’t work. But Microsoft is still trying—and I can guarantee, it will keep on trying until it succeeds.

The only possible answer for Microsoft and OOXML is simple: the world already has an office file format. The world doesn’t need nor want a “conversion nightmare”. The world’s ISO-approved Office format already exists: it’s called ODF. Microsoft: deal with it!

I thought I would point out something that I assume is fairly obvious to most people:

Saving your documents in OOXML format right now is probably about the riskiest thing you can do if you are concerned with long term interoperability.

First, the “official” ECMA OOXML that was submitted to ISO