06.04.09

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Hungary Makes ODF a National Standard

Posted in Europe, OpenDocument, Standard, SUN at 7:02 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: The already-long list of ODF-supportive countries just keeps growing

LAST week/month we saw Ecuador hopping on the ODF bandwagon and this week it’s Hungary. IBM’s Weir and Sutor take pride in that. “I hope it will affect at least state institutions, including educational ones,” says a contributor of ours from Hungary.

Microsoft corruption in Hungary, which includes OOXML dirty tricks, has left supporters of Free software in Hungary somewhat bitter and demoralised (hat tip: Nagy György), so this is a refreshing change. See for example what we wrote in:

Hungary has now a commitment to ODF, which enables interoperability, choice, and the use of Free software (OOXML is Microsoft Office only). This is the type of thing which causes the Microsoft ecosystem to attack ODF so viciously these days [1, 2, 3, 4, 5].

Sun Microsystems has also just released the ODF Plugin 3.1 for Microsoft Office.

A new version of the ODF Plugin for Microsoft Office is available.

As I wrote in the last ODF Plugin announcement, the Plugin nowadays uses the same version number like the underlying OpenOffice.org version, so this version is now based on OpenOffice.org 3.1.

This ODF plugin is hugely important because Microsoft’s own implementation (MSODF) is doing more harm than good. It breaks interoperability [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7].

In other encouraging news, Apple is being lobbied to support ODF properly.

6 Projects We Hope Apple Is Building

[...]

2. OpenDocument Format (ODF) support in iWorks

ODF is an ISO standard for office document formats, with many government agencies in the world adopt the standard as compulsory interchange format. More organizations would be willing to adopt iWorks if ODF is a supported format. For consumers, it means their files can be saved in a format that is independent of iWorks software version changes.

Thus far, Apple has not been a true friend of ODF. Can it ultimately change its ways? ODF is here to stay and thrive, so sooner or later Apple will have to adapt anyway. █

Microsoft cannot buy its way to abolishment of ODF

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3 Comments

Needs Sunlight said,

June 4, 2009 at 7:09 am

“our engineers are looking into it” is all Apple ever says about ODF. Perhaps they made too many Faustian deals with MS to keep legacy applications like MS Office around for the Mac. Who knows?

It would help if the Apple bug reporting system were like a normal site and links to the specific bug reports could be passed around and progress (or lack thereof) followed publicly.

Great news about open standards in Hungary.
Silverlokk said,

June 8, 2009 at 8:48 am

Interestingly enough, WordPad in Windows 7 beta at least opens ODF documents, although I haven’t been able to thoroughly test it, not bothering to spend too much time there.

Roy Schestowitz Reply:
June 8th, 2009 at 9:43 am
Microsoft’s implementation of MSODF does more harm than good. They spread this to fragment ODF.