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Standards: Have Any Suggestions for the Next Version of ODF?

By Pamela Jones et al.

I want you to know that your comments and emails on the last article asking how the two ISO standards (26300 and 29500, commonly known as ODF and OOXML) are doing these days on the openness graph have been read and appreciated. They are useful. There is room for more commenting, including personal experiences you've had struggling to interact with governmental agencies that make little or no allowance for users of Linux. You can comment on the article itself or email me privately.

And now comes news that there is a chance to have input into the next major version of ODF, for now being called 'ODF-Next'. There is a call for proposals that went out Friday from the ODF technical committee, and here's where you go to read all about it and to leave your comments. You can comment here too, of course, but you must input there if you wish your input to be registered and considered. What would you like to see in the feature set of the next major release of ODF? What capabilities does ODF need?

Personally, I'd say the main thing it needs is what only Microsoft can provide: true interoperability, guaranteed, with Microsoft's 'standard'. I am hearing from one and all that the crutches being offered for ODF to try to do so don't really work very well. That is wrong. Period. It's what I expected, but it needs to be fixed. What if there were another natural disaster, like Katrina? Interoperability and the ability to communicate with government agencies can mean your life. It's that serious, and who is to argue that the lives of Linux users don't matter?

Full post as published by Groklaw on February 23, 2009 (boomark / email).