Congratulations. It's official!
My colleague in our international standards team writes: "the OASIS
Open Document Format spec is now an international standard. Its
designation is ISO/IEC 26300. It passed without oppostion. (There
were a few abstentions.) There was very broad support worldwide."
This is a landmark moment for the Free/Open Source Software movement.
An innovation that started here - the OpenDocument family of file
formats - has been reviewed, adopted and now endorsed at the highest
level as an international standard. We now have a standard for
productivity documents that is recognised by governments (there is a
little more bureaucracy to handle, as Andy Updegrove reports[1], but
the standard is official).
If we wish, we can now draw a base-line across the productivity tools
market and tell our suppliers we will not tolerate further
competition and lock-in below that line. Innovation above that line
is desirable - expected, even - but attempts to force upgrade, lock
out competition, control my own use of my own data, are all now
unacceptable. We have the tools of freedom in our hands. Time to use
them.
digg story: http://digg.com/software/OpenDocument_is_now_ISO_26300
S.
[1] http://www.consortiuminfo.org/standardsblog/article.php?
story=20060503080915835
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