Novell has joined the board overseeing the technical
committee responsible for the development of the open source Open
Document Format (ODF).
Development of the standard is being driven by the Oasis standards
body, which originally introduced the document format. The
initiative aims to create an open standard for text and documents
which allows the content to be easily used across applications.
Novell does not have any products which use the ODF standard,
but the firm does bundle a version of the Open Office productivity
suite with its SuSE desktop Linux product.
The Open Office suite now supports ODF, as does Sun
Microsystems’ Star Office 8 collaboration suite.
Both products are targeting Microsoft’s dominant Office suite,
which doesn’t support ODF.
Microsoft recently said that its forthcoming Office 12 suite
would support Adobe’s popular PDF document format, a decision which
Microsoft said wasn’t related to the growing support for ODF.
The US state of Massachusetts recently said it would require
applications in some parts of its government to support ODF, a move
that angered Microsoft as it could potentially limit software sales
to the state.