opendocument

Winning the OpenDocument vs. OpenXML war

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In August 2005 Peter Quinn, now retired Chief Information Officer of Massachusetts, decided that OpenDocument was the best way to store documents with the guarantee that they would be able to be opened 10, 30, 50 years from now. For a state government, this is particularly important. He led Massachusetts toward OpenDocument and OpenOffice.org. The move, which sparked controversy and ferocious lobbying, is likely to end-up in history books (and while we’re at it, I’ll mention that history books in particular ought to be accessible 50, 100, 1000 years from now!).

ISO won't fast-track MS OOXML consideration

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Background: OpenDocument format was approved as an ISO standard in May 2006. This was important for the free software community because there are free software applications for reading and writing OpenDocument files.