The International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO)
has approved the open source Open Document Format (ODF) as an
international data format standard.
The ODF Alliance, a cross-section of industry associations,
academic institutions and suppliers, had been lobbying for the
decision.
The ODF Alliance has more than 150 members worldwide and was
created to resolve the potential problem of proprietary software
limiting the ability of governments to access, retrieve and use
records and documents in the future.
The ODF is designed to make it easier for organisations to
access and retrieve electronic government and business documents.
It is seen as a possible way to prevent users from being locked
into suppliers’ proprietary file formats.
“Approval of the ODF by the ISO marks an important milestone in
the effort to help governments solve the very real problem of
finding a better way to preserve, access and control their
documents now and in the future,” said Marino Marcich, executive
director of the ODF Alliance.
The ODF emerged from work by the Openoffice.org project, which
has developed an open source suite of office applications to
compete with the likes of Microsoft’s Office and IBM’s Notes.