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The New OpenDocument Standard

(This post was part of a separate “Standards Blog” which has been merged into my main blog)

Slashdot posted a story about the approval of the new OpenDocument standard by OASIS. The actual standard is available in PDF and OpenOffice formats. The obvious focus of this activity is against Microsoft and its closed Office formats. A closer look reveals some interesting details.

First of all, this has not been yet approved as an official OASIS standard – merely as an “OASIS committee draft”. This means that this standard is approved by this committee but is yet to be approved by OASIS as whole (similar to IETF’s WG vs. IESG approval). Nevertheless this is a big step in the standardization process but should not be construed as “final approval”. (As an interesting sidepoint, Microsoft is a member of OASIS with a director on the OASIS Board who serves as secretary of the board. At the same time, the appeals process for OASIS goes to the Board.)

UPDATE: Formal OASIS approval was announced

Additionally, it is interesting to note who OASIS is. It is a standards body which originally concetrated on development of SGML and eventually started focusing on XML-related standards, mainly in the business area. In the Internet standards world, the W3C has been focusing on basic XML standards such as XML itself, XSLT, RDF, etc. while OASIS has been working on “value added” XML standards, especially industry or task specific XML dialects such as the OpenDocument format. Given their existing relationship with ISO, approval by OASIS creates a pathway towards approval by the ISO itself. Of course, ISO approval is important for governments who are one of the main areas being focused by OpenOffice and other open source folks pushing this.

It is also interesting to see who the working group members are. Tom Magliery used to work on the original NCSA Mosaic browser and is also one of the original members of the XML working group at the W3C. Nathaniel Borenstein is the creator of MIME and is a well known IETF member. David Faure is one of KDE contributors. There are also some IBM and Sun folks as well as some individuals. Given IBM’s interest in OpenOffice and Sun’s involvement in StarOffice, their membership is not suprising. There is also Patrick Durusau of the Society of Biblical Literature (not for much longer) (I would venture to guess that given that the Bible is the most widely printed book in the world, it would make sense that a Bible society would be interested in open document standards).

Now about the format itself: OpenDocument is an XML-based format for word processing, spreadsheets and presentation documents. It grew out of the OpenOffice 1.0 format (which itself is based on Sun’s StarOffice). Unlike Microsoft Office, WordPerfect and a slew of other propertietary formats, this format is completely open and royalty-free (well, almost – Sun’s has an IPR disclosure requiring reciprocal licensing). What this means is that everyone is free to create, share and edit this format in any program that supports it. However, what is more important is that anyone can write software to support this format. Since this specification is wide-open and freely available, open source, closed source and mixed-source software is free to work with this format.

What is also exciting is that OpenOffice 2.0 and KWord 1.4 (part of KOffice, the KDE office Suite) will support this format by default. At the same time given that governments are pushing open document standards, this couldn’t be a better time for this. Assuming that OASIS approves this standard and the ISO follows, Microsoft and other closed-format vendors will be at somewhat of a disadvantage regarding this.

One possibility as to what may happen is that proprietary vendors may start supporting open formats just like they are forced to support open standards (most of the time). That means that closed-source and open-source vendors can finally compete on a more level playing fields: based on functionality and technical merits as opposed to being locked in by a specific proprietary format or standards, or as in open source solely on price. Of course the fear is that just like every other standards, vendors may start making custom extensions to the formats/standards, this locking people in. It remains to be seen what actually will take place.

Tags: ipr, microsoft, open standards, openoffice, pdf —

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