There is an important and interesting comment in Rob Weir's blog. The following was said by Weir in relation to the ODF hijack that we showed last night, in reply to a question from WuMingShi:

There are several participants in SC34 who have had the stated goal of taking control of OOXML and ODF and maintaining them both in SC34 WG's. They've been quite open about this plan. The problem is that they are planning a future for standards that they neither own nor control nor have technical expertise.

This was an interesting goal when they first articulated this idea, around two years ago. However, now that we've seen that JTC1 is easily corruptible, both at the NB, SC and administrative levels, that JTC1 is incapable of fairly carrying out its own Directives, and that in practice SC34 is now so dominated by Microsoft that we could consider it a fully integrated division of Microsoft Corp., this push toward maintaining ODF in SC34 is both naive and dangerous. It will not happen. Doing so would be a huge step backwards in participation,openness, transparency, in IP rights and in technical quality. Drain the swamp first, and then let's talk.

Yes. You read that right. SC34 participants are shamelessly open about their plan to hijack ODF. Remember that SC34 comprises mostly Microsoft employees. Alan Lord is so angry about this that he even misspells "Microsoft."

But OOXML is not quite dead yet. There is a danger. And one we must all be vigilant toward: There is a possibility of Microshaft and it’s Lackeys trying to gain control of the maintenance of the ODF standard. Currently this is handled by the very open and transparent OASIS organisation. This process might end up being transferred to ISO under the guise of a group known as SC34. This committee is loaded full of Microsoft puppets - several of whom are British and have shown a total disregard for due process to this date.

We shall write more about this as soon as new details emerge.

In the mean time, it's worth noting that the fourth release candidate of OpenOffice.org 3.0 has just been released, with only days remaining before the final release.

These notes contains changes between SRC680_m242 and SRC680_m248 as well as between DEV300_m1 and DEV300_m27 as well as between OOO300_m1 and OOO300_m9. This release will install as OpenOffice.org 3.0.

The developers of KDE report on their support of ODF in KWord. KOffice uses ODF as its default format.

It's been a long busy month. With the impending 2.0 release, I have been hacking away polishing up ODF list support for KWord.

How scary it must be for Microsoft to see ODF adopted so rapidly. It realises that it must derail ODF -- fast. ⬆