Inconsequential Drama In the ODF Camp

Over the last few days there has been a lot of discussion in the press and on blogs about some so-called fragmentation in the world of ODF, or the Open Document Format.

Much of the press is centered on the evolving views that members of the Open Document Foundation have around what it means to be a document format in today’s world, and what the future looks like for ODF under current management and maintenance regimes.

The Open Document Foundation would like to see some significant changes made to ODF that will enable compatibility with the billions of office automation documents that exist in the world today, while the powerful corporate forces that sit behind the format in the OASIS ODF TC are not so keen, presumably because of the cost that these significant changes would force upon their development teams.

From a recent NewsBLOG post on News.Com;

“We can’t meet our market requirements with OpenDocument,” said Gary Edwards who started the OpenDocument Foundation last year. “The truth is OpenDocument was never designed to meet market requirements.”

Instead Gary and the team at the Open Document Foundation are advocating focusing their efforts on the W3C Compound Document Format which is still in early stages of development, to quote Gary again from the same article;

“The thing you notice about CDF right away is that you are not working in the confines of how OpenOffice implements lists and tables. ODF directly reflects how OpenOffice does things,” Edwards said.

So, for me the question then comes back to what this all means for policy makers across the Asia region that I have spent time discussing this topic with over the last year or so, and frankly my view is that it doesn’t really mean a great deal, if anything at all.

There has been a lot of focus on ODF in recent months, mainly because an earlier version of the OASIS led format was pushed through the ISO standardization process, then as Open XML was presented for standardization a debate started to rage over which format should be the one true format for storing office automation files. My view and Microsoft’s official position has always been that there is a need and space for multiple document formats in the market place, supporting different users needs.

In reality the push for one true format is a simplistic view of a very complex world, and it denies the lessons of that we have been taught many times by history around such single standard choices in the rapidly advancing world of information technology.

Wikipedia lists 40+ XML based document markup languages, some for specific purposes and some designed for more generic applications. Not one of those file formats will meet all use cases as we know them today in the office automation world. Even with the number of entries documented by Wikipedia editors it is not an extensive list, and we all know that the future holds additional document formats that have either not been written, or not been published as yet.

History teaches us that standards come and go as technology advances, especially in areas where significant and rapid advancements are being made. 

ODF in itself is a pretty tight and elegant standard, but in its current form it does not meet the needs of the vast majority of users of today’s office automation tools. There has been a visible but limited market adoption of the standard. To go further, as Gary very rightly points out, there is still significantly more work to be done before the ODF specification meets the broad generic needs of the 600+ million office automation application users in the world today.

Nobody can predict what decisions will have been taken and what directional changes will have been made in the world of office automation technology by the time this work is complete.

So, what does this drama really mean for the world of open documents? As I say, in my view not a great deal really, this is just the way of things.

What is important for governments and enterprises is that the way that they store their data is well documented , and that there is an assurance that they will be able to access that data many years from now using a range of implementations.

Given the repetitive lessons of the last several decades of computing have taught us, wisdom frequently involves leaving options open whenever possible. Indeed examples that I have discussed before such as x400 email or the TP4 ethernet transport protocols should lead us to be wary of writing any policy that commits to a single standard for anything.