Press release - for immediate release OpenOffice.org welcomes Microsoft's tentative moves towards OpenDocument
OpenOffice.org welcomes the news that Microsoft has bowed to pressure from the marketplace, which is demanding Microsoft adopts ISO 26300 Open Document Format (ODF) as its native file format for all its Office products. Microsoft's announcement of official support for a proposed ODF converter is the first step towards meeting that demand, and will give users of its Office software partial access to the standard. Microsoft has previously tried to deflect the market pressure by proposing its own 'Microsoft standard', called 'Office Open XML'. OpenOffice.org calls on Microsoft to drop its proprietary 'standard'. Instead, Microsoft should give users of all its Office products the ability to use ISO 26300 as their default file format. This facility should be provided as a free-of-charge upgrade for all versions of MS-Office, as the marketplace today is dominated by older versions of the software. OpenOffice.org also calls on all software suppliers currently supporting ISO 26300 to work with Microsoft to ensure the standard meets Microsoft’s needs for office data storage. Together, all parties need to set up independent conformance testing to guarantee software products do work with the standard. The testing needs to be accessible not just to large corporates like Sun, IBM, and Microsoft, but also to smaller open-source players like KOffice. OpenOffice.org 2 was the first office software package in the world to support ISO 26300 as its native file format. On release of version 2, OpenOffice.org also released free of charge upgrades to users of its version 1 software. OpenOffice.org encourages users of Microsoft Office products to take OpenOffice.org 2 for a test drive, and if they like it, keep the software for free - see http://why.openoffice.org. About OpenOffice.org The OpenOffice.org Community is an international team of volunteer and sponsored contributors who develop, support, and promote the leading open-source office productivity suite, OpenOffice.org®. OpenOffice.org supports the Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) OASIS Standard (ISO/IEC 26300) as well as legacy industry file formats and is available on major computing platforms in over 70 languages. OpenOffice.org is provided under the GNU Lesser General Public Licence (LGPL) and may be used free of charge for any purpose, private or commercial. The OpenOffice.org Community acknowledges generous sponsorship from a number of companies, including Sun Microsystems, the founding sponsor and primary contributor. Links The OpenOffice.org Community can be found at http://www.openoffice.org To learn more of the project, see http://about.openoffice.org/ OpenOffice.org 2.0.3 may be downloaded free of charge from http://download.openoffice.org Further information about the suite may be found at http://www.openoffice.org/product Press Contacts John McCreesh (UTC +01h00) OpenOffice.org Marketing Project Lead [EMAIL PROTECTED] +44 (0)7 810 278 540 Cristian Driga (UTC +0200) OpenOffice.org Marketing Project Co-Lead [EMAIL PROTECTED] +40 7887 000 60 Louis Suarez-Potts (UTC -04h00) OpenOffice.org Community Manager [EMAIL PROTECTED] +1 (416) 625 3843 Worldwide Marketing Contacts http://marketing.openoffice.org/contacts.html --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
