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China Martens at InfoWorld:
A group of more than 35 U.S. and international IT vendors, organizations, academic institutions and industry bodies is due to announce the formation of the OpenDocument Format (ODF) Alliance Friday.
The new body, whose initial members include IBM, Oracle, and Sun Microsystems, will focus on further evangelizing the OpenDocument electronic file format.
Open Document Format for Office Applications, also known as OpenDocument, is being developed by the OASIS standards body as an XML (extensible markup language) file format. The format covers text, spreadsheets and other document types created by office productivity suites. Supporters of OpenDocument include offerings from open-source players and Sun’s StarOffice and IBM’s Workplace software suites.
The ODF Alliance has formed under the auspices of trade association the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA). Other IT vendors in the alliance include Corel, EMC, Novell, and Red Hat.
There’s more in the article, including how the alliance would have aided Massachusetts CIO Peter Quinn in his fight for Open Document. The ODF Alliance web site is now online and has more information.
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March 7th, 2006 at 7:03 PM
[...] And speaking of Office and interoperability complaints, Microsoft immediately slammed the OpenDocument Format Alliance formed late last week by prominent competitors. Peter Galli at eWeek: Microsoft is accusing some competitors of exactly the same thing of which they have criticized the software company: pushing an exclusive standard to the detriment of all others and not enabling choice. … Alan Yates, general manager of Microsoft’s Information Worker Business Strategy in Redmond, Wash., this week accused the alliance, which he referred to as “Sun, IBM and their friends,” of wanting to push the ODF as an “exclusive” standard to the detriment of all others, rather than enabling choice among formats like PDF from Adobe, Microsoft’s OpenXML and HTML. [...]