ODF Alliance, Who, What, Where (and Why?)

Andy Updegrove writes "On Friday, the new ODF Alliance was launched with much fanfare to 'educate government' about the OpenDocument Format. A flurry of brief news articles appeared the same day, based on pre-launch interviews (as well as an Op/Ed piece in the Wall Street Journal by Sun's Scott McNealy), but they didn't include much information. So what's it all about, why was it formed, and will it be likely to succeed? Given that the 36 members include only one government unit (the ICT department for Vienna), the answer is clearly to establish a beachhead in the government market as a target of opportunity, and then to expand from there to meet the real goals of the members."

Re:More standard formats

[dotpavan]

Speaking of witch, What exactly stops MS from incorporating a crippled version of OpenDocuments, thereby changing the standard (like they did to HTML)?

black magic :)

Re:Office XML open enough?

[jZnat]

Now that's a little FUDdy; the IE7 development team is trying much harder than in the past to improve its HTML and CSS rendering, but a monstrosity such as IE must be quite difficult to get up to par with the year 1999 [w3.org] let alone 2006 and beyond (with all the modularisation parties going on at W3C).