..::B:R:A:D::..

[TextMaker Adds ODF Support]
It looks like we will be able to add yet another application to our list of programs that do/will support the OpenDocument Format! SoftMaker’s word processing application, TextMaker, will include OpenDocument compatability in it’s next version. There is currently a beta available for TextMaker 2005 for Windows and a Linux version will be out at a later time. Right now it appears that the first production release will only include ODF import filters but export filters will be added after the intial release.

[Intel Joins OASIS ODF Committe]
Intel has joined the OASIS OpenDocument Technical Committee. What was more interesting to me after seeing this news was seeing who their representative is, Waldo Bastian. Waldo Bastian is a KDE developer who formally worked for SuSE. He also joins David Faure, another KDE developer, and Jody Goldberg, the current maintainer of Gnumeric and Novell employee.

[ODF Promotion]
A group of volunteer’s have banded together to create the OpenDocument Fellowship, to support the work of community volunteers in promoting, improving and providing user assistance for the OASIS Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) and software designed to operate on data in this format.

Sun and IBM look like they are holding a one day meeting on promoting ODF. From their announcement: “The purpose of this meeting is to coordinate the technical and strategic advancement of the OASIS Open Document Format for Office Applications (ODF) and its implementation in products from many vendors.”

An interesting quote they use in their announcement sounds a lot like a similar quote I have always used in reference to open file formats:

“They are our documents: we should be able to do whatever we want with them, whenever we want, with whatever application we wish to use.”

My quote (from Open Source TCO):

“If you can’t do whatever you want, where ever you want, however you want with your data then you don’t own/control it.”

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 2nd, 2005 at 8:11 pm and is filed under Linux, General. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will appear immediately, but I reserve the right to delete innapropriate comments.