ODF Alliance Continues to Grow and Build Out

Andy Updegrove writes "As you may recall, a new organization called the ODF Alliance was formed on March 3 of this year to support the uptake of the OpenDocument Format (ODF) by governments. Yesterday, the ODF Alliance issued a press release announcing that it has more than tripled its membership to 138, has appointed a Managing Director with strong European experience (Marino Marcich), and is lobbying countries globally to vote for ODF in ISO. Overall, the picture is one of a growing organization that plans to be around for awhile, and particularly hopes to make its impact in Europe, from which a large number of its members have arrived, where governmental interest in ODF is highest, and risks to government CIOS therefore lowest."

Full list of members:

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

Full list of members can be found here [odfalliance.org] (and FAQ here) [odfalliance.org]

I note that Apple is not a member - I suggest all slashdotters write to Apple to support ODF & join this alliance. After all, Apple is no longer relying on MS for a browser - why rely on MS for an office suite?

Re:138....?

[EraserMouseMan]

I think it's 138 organizations, not individual people.

Re:Full list of members:

[Anonymous Coward]

OpenOffice.org also does not run natively on Mac OS X. There is a clunky X11 version which is slow and horrible.

NeoOffice, on the other hand, is an OO.o fork that runs just fine and is much ahead of the OSX X11 version of OO.o. Too bad it's still based on OO.o 1.1 and can only read ODF...

Politicians != Government

[Khammurabi]

Once they are involved, what's to stop them from forcing design decisions upon the standards which make it easier for them to control and watch us?

I think you're confusing government bureaucrats with politicians. Having worked for a government IT bureau, I can say that open documents would be welcomed and would have made our lives a hell of a lot easier. My team was charged with managing the 13 step process of bill creation and adoption for the legislature, which included no less than 6 legacy programming languages. The users and developers involved would have jumped at the chance of open document standards, since it removes the inherent half-life of proprietary formats.

The problem is that the head of the bureau is chosen by a politician. While I can say from experience that our head was actively guided by his appointed party as to what software we were allowed to use, I can not comment on other bureau's machinations. So while the bureau grunts would have loved open document standards, the politicians who have the proprietary donors would probably stifle it.