OpenDocument Alliance to Fight Digital Dark Age

OSS_ilation writes "A consortium of vendors and academic institutions -- including IBM, Sun Microsystems and the American Library Association -- has announced today that they are forming the OpenDocument Alliance as part of an effort to promote open file standards worldwide. The group will support the one truly open standard file format, OpenDocument, which is an XML-based file format used saving and exchanging editable office documents such as text documents, spreadsheets and presentations. Sun's Simon Phipps said he believed ODF would allow future generations to view all of today's digital docs and prevent a digital Dark Age from occurring."

Cool name!

[Rob T Firefly]

Naming your interest group "The [anything] Alliance" gives it that hardcore "We'll form Voltron and smite you if you look at us wrong" street cred.

Re:Dark age already upon us

[IflyRC]

I know, all of my data stored on my Commodore 128 can't be ported to my Linux machine since it doesn't have drivers for the 1571.

Re:Dark age already upon us

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, the IS a driver:
http://www.lb.shuttle.de/puffin/cbm4linux/ [shuttle.de]

Re:Dark age already upon us

[flyingsquid]

Only one answer then. We'll establish a foundation on the edge of the Galaxy to preserve these documents for the next thousand years...

Oh my, this reminds me of something

[A beautiful mind]

Three Standards for the iMac-kings under the sky,
Seven for the HURD-lords in their halls of stone,
Nine for Microsoft Men doomed to die,
One for the Big Blue on his sparc throne,
In the Land of Sun where the Shadows lie,
One Standard to rule them all, One Standard to find them,
One Standard to bring them all and in the darkness unite them
In the Land of Sun, where the Shadows lie,

The One Truly Open Standard.

Re:Digital Dark Age?

[Cumikaze]

I don't think anyone cares unless.. Wait, it makes more sense like this:
"...figure out how gigabytes or terabytes of PR0N information will be saved for future generations..."
Now we have a problem that needs to be solved. Get to it!

Re:THE one truly open format?

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, please hand in your geek credentials at the desk for "65 means the character A, 67 character B and so on".

Whoops, sorry for that, btw I believe you meant descendants and not ancestors ;-)

Re:Digital Dark Age My Ass

[Anonymous Coward]

"the fact that people ARE musing on shit like Paris Hilton IS going to be interesting to future historians,"

Yes, but we don't want them to know that. Too embarrassing.

Re:first post

[ajs318]

And you forgot to log in, so we can't even congratulate you.

Why can't we have Slashdot set up so that ACs can't post until a logged-in user has made the first post? That would put an end to the riduculous "first post" trolls.

Re:THE one truly open format?

[Chosen Reject]

No, he probably means our ancestors. They were the ones who cracked the codes in WWII. With the trends in education we see today, our descendants probably won't be able to decipher correctly spelled English.

Re:Cool name!

[Damek]

Just watch out that you don't get served [google.com]!