Governments around the world and now in some states in the US are adopting an international standard for document creation, the OpenDocument Format (ODF), for the purpose of ensuring that official government documents produced with today’s word processors and spreadsheets and other “office” software will be accessible to governments, historians, and citizens in the future.
The OpenDocument format was recently adopted for state agencies in Massachusetts and now ODF bills have been introduced in the Texas and Minnesota state legislatures according to a recent article at CNET News.
Microsoft Corporation, whose most lucrative source of income is the omnipresent Microsoft Office suite of software programs, lobbied extensively in Massachusetts to prevent adoption of ODF in that state.
Governments are moving to ODF for issues of historic preservation, cost savings, and autonomy. They are concerned about the negative consequences of vendor lock-in such as digital format obsolescence and loss of control over vital information assets that are inherent in continued reliance on documents produced with “closed source” proprietary software.
Other major competitors of Microsoft’s Office programs, such as the FREE, opensource, OpenOffice suite of productivity tools (which includes word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, graphics, and database programs) have already adopted ODF as their native document format. Google’s great new service Google Docs and Spreadsheets also allows ODF export and import options.
To its credit, Microsoft recently, albeit reluctantly, released an ODF converter plugin.
Incompatibility of documents produced with early versions of Microsoft products is one of the longstanding criticisms of Microsoft. Some industry analysts have accused Microsoft of using planned obsolescence of their file formats as a marketing strategy to force individuals and organizations to upgrade to newer versions of their software.
For more information, see the following links.
