June 4th, 2007
OpenDocument or OpenXML: Do you care?
A week or so ago, I published a podcast at IT Conversation with Scott Mace interviewing Gary Edwards about OpenDocument. Edwards is the president of the OpenDocument Foundation. OpenDocument Foundation is a non-profit that works to promote the OpenDocument file format–an XML file format for office documents.
There’s no question that businesses want an XML-based file format for office data. The question, naturally, is which XML-based file format. Microsoft has it’s own XML-based file format called OpenXML.
Longtime readers of this blog will know that this issue was big news a while back when Massachusetts opted to require OpenDocument as the official file format for state documents.
In the podcast, Edwards makes the point that adopting OpenXML means lock-in to Microsoft products on an unprecedented scale. Microsoft counters that OpenDocument can’t support everything they need to do to build the product their customers want. Edwards counters with detailed and sometimes subtle arguments, but his primary point is that OpenDocument will work for everything.
If this sort of thing is important to you, you’ll probably enjoy hearing Edwards’ take on the issue. In the meantime, I’m curious what you think about it.
Loading …Phil Windley is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Brigham Young University. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
