Bonum Certa Men Certa

ODF Roundup: Norway, Germany Migration, ODF 1.2 Support, and ODF 1.1 Interop Profile



Summary: Overview encompassing 3 weeks of ODF progress and victories

IT has been a long time since our last ODF update, so here is a long post catching up with key events and developments.



According to Peter Krantz, a seminar on ODF took place at Copenhagen Business School one week ago. Bart Hanssens and others noticed it and Hanssens has added this event to the ODF Web site at XML.org.

Location: Copenhagen, Denmark Date: 12 Jan 2010 - 09:30 - 15:00 Event Type: Conference


According to published reports in Norwegian and in English, Norwegian Broadcasting moves to OpenOffice.org and ODF. This is great news, but it's nowhere as big as the news from Munich, which was mostly covered in German (rarely in English). Coverage includes:



There is a lot more about this coming from individual people, with one person saying: "congrats to the #limux team for the complete switch to #odf #linux"

Wikipedia has been updated to reflect on this and the debate carries on. Over in Denmark, a decision on open standards was said to be on the eve of a final decision after the scandals. According to a rough translation from Denmark, Midtjylland is turning to ODF and possibly leaving Microsoft Office. They cite problems with interoperability between Microsoft's versions of Office. So typical.

Some people still wonder what software is good for ODF support and Sun releases ODF Plugin 3.1 for Microsoft Office, which includes support for ODF 1.2. Microsoft itself supports MSODF, which is not ODF [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7].

There is also freeware and GPL-licensed software that adds ODF support to Microsoft Office.

Drupal's support of ODF was mentioned here before, but here it is again in some blog posts and in the ODF Web site, sitting there alongside another new page about OfficeReader (also see OffiViewer).

“Jesper Lund Stocholm and his friends from Microsoft are generally still trolling ODF, as usual.”Sander Marechal adds an anonymiser to Officeshots and the Microsoft provocateur Jesper Lund Stocholm trolls such a feature nonetheless.

Jesper Lund Stocholm and his friends from Microsoft are generally still trolling ODF, as usual. It seems as though Alex Brown and his buddies from Microsoft are bound to make another BSI fiasco. The Internet never forgets.

A Microsoft-sponsored ODF seminar (yes, from the company that attacks ODF) is to take place, according to Microsoft's ODF-hostile trolls. Unlike IBM for example, Microsoft still wishes to eliminate ODF. That's just its business objective.

Over in Brazil, there is a debate about ODF [OGG]. A rough translation of some coverage says that the "The director of the ODF Alliance Jomar Silva, @Homembit, was a guest at the table discussion on memory International Seminar of the Forum of Brazilian Digital Culture."

[an error occurred while processing this directive]



Direct link



Over in the UK, the OSA's Mark Antony is told that politicians can be believed "they're sincere when Whitehall is running on Ubuntu & documents on govt. websites are available in ODF..."

“Currently, Microsoft does not properly support ODF and it still treats it like a second-class citizen.”SJVN has his personal interpretation of the impact of the i4i decision [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12]. "Maybe in the aftermath of the i4i decision," he argues, everyone will "just have to bite the bullet & support ODF." Currently, Microsoft does not properly support ODF and it still treats it like a second-class citizen. Google too has some catching up to do, based on D. R. Evans, not to mention Apple, which has been helping Microsoft against ODF. As one person put it earlier this month, "ISO's current defect report for ISO 29500 (OOXML) has 809 pages. That are 71 pages more than the full specification of ODF 1.1! !" Miguel de Icaza helped Microsoft address some of these errors, but since then he has been crowned and named Microsoft MVP [1, 2]. He's like part of that company.

The UX OpenOffice.org blog marks the beginning of the new year and reports from the UX meeting in Hamburg [1, 2] while ZDNet Germany writes about KOffice 2.1.1 (there's more about Lotus Symphony). Bart Hanssens writes about ODF content at FOSDEM. He is preparing a talk and he has also uploaded a new draft of ODF 1.1 Interop Profile. His colleague Dennis Hamilton is happy about it.

Our reader The Mad Hatter is making valuable information future-proof right about now:

Open Formats – I’m Moving all Mom’s Poetry to Open Document Format



[...]

Of course if you do want access to Mom’s poetry, you can just go to OpenOffice.Org, and download Open Office at no cost. There’s no reason you can’t have both Microsoft Office and Open Office installed on the same computer.


In summary, even though there are no major ODF events, this international standard continues to develop and be adopted all around the world.

Comments

Recent Techrights' Posts

Links 02/06/2025: Political Leftovers, DRM, and Patents
Links for the day
Links 02/06/2025: Microsoft Spins Layoffs as "Slop", Frontier Settles Lawsuit
Links for the day
When You Publicly Boast About Wanting to Violently Attack People (Even Colleagues) Finding a Job Will Prove Difficult
there's a lesson to be learned here
The Web We Lost, the Information Lost Due to Microsoft's Attacks on Companies Like Yahoo! (Before the LLM Slop Frenzy)
When it comes to news sites, what can we say?
Covering Corruption in Poland, Including a War on Science (Due to Bad Politicians)
What we're about to show is that skilled and experienced scientists in Poland are besieged by bureaucrats
Gemini Links 02/06/2025: "Star Wars Day" and "Security Day"
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Sunday, June 01, 2025
IRC logs for Sunday, June 01, 2025
The Openwashing Shills Initiative (OSI) - Part II: Lying to the IRS is a Big Issue
The OSI of today pretends to be something that it is not
Bloodlust and Love of Blades (Fascination With Murder) Nothing New Among Microsofters
Violence is not a joke and no group is magically entitled to make such "jokes"
Links 01/06/2025: Bird Flu, Food Price Inflation, and Growing US-China Hostilities
Links for the day
Links 01/06/2025: "Vibe Coding" Turns Out to be a Fraud and Amazon Merits Boycott, Argue Bloggers
Links for the day
Gemini Links 01/06/2025: "Stardust" and Ideal PC Setup
Links for the day
Links 01/06/2025: Windows TCO, Openwashing, "It's FOSS" Still Promoting Microsoft
Links for the day
Gemini Links 01/06/2025: Simplification and Networks Everywhere
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Saturday, May 31, 2025
IRC logs for Saturday, May 31, 2025
Google Bribes EFF. EFF Promotes LLM Slop as 'Fair Use'. To GAFAM It's a Low-Cost Lobby Hedge.
So the bribes pay off ("slush fund") and the word spreads
Slopwatch: Fake Text and Images, Financial Bubbles, and Scams in "Intelligent" Clothing
Sometimes what they mean by "AI" is just cheap labour somewhere else, as we discussed in IRC a few hours ago
Why Microsoft is Collapsing (Similar to What's Happening at IBM), As Insiders See It
IBM seems like one heck of a mess
Reliable Computing Means Free (Libre) Computing
Sites that want to promote security ought to deal with the biggest issues
Links 31/05/2025: US Court Orders Sides With RFE/RL, War Updates From Ukraine
Links for the day
Gemini Links 31/05/2025: ARM Server and power_supply Subsystem
Links for the day
Links 31/05/2025: Slop Stigmatised as Disinformation, Catalyst/Driver of "Death of Communication"
Links for the day
Common Sense 101: Do Not Write Blog Posts Saying You Want to Murder Colleagues (or Yourself)
Only crazy people would think stabbings are a joke
Microsoft Bankruptcy
"Microsoft unit in Russia to file for bankruptcy, database shows"
Techrights Does Not Compete With LLM Slop, It Exposes the Bastards, Plagiarists and Scammers Who Do That
People like Scam Altman, still facing a lawsuit from his own sister for sexual abuse against her
Links 31/05/2025: Microsoft-Connected Builder.ai is a Fraud and US is Purging Students Based on Race/Nationality
Links for the day
Gemini Links 30/05/2025: Limmat, Doomscrollers, and Arguments Parsing
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, May 30, 2025
IRC logs for Friday, May 30, 2025