Our difficulties with the direction of ODF development at the OASIS TCs will be easier for our friends and competitors to understand with Gary & marbux's post on LinuxWorld, "Game over for OpenDocument?" (July 23, 2007).
There is in particular a great misreading by people of the difficulty organizations face in implementing ODF policies.
Most people think the implementation of ODF is as easy as downloading OpenOffice.org and converting your legacy documents to ODF as they are used. Simply fix the artifacts of conversion in process, and never look back. OOo is free. So what's not to like?
The problem is that requirements differ at the enterprise level, which are heavily invested in fully automated business processes. In such situations there is no opportunity for manual inspection of documents for conversion artifacts. Flawless integration of applications is mandatory, and the existing inventory of enterprise documents is stored in Microsoft binary formats. The quality (fidelity) of document format conversions must be very, very high. Does it matter? Would you want your doctor to perform surgery on you while making decisions from an automatically generated history of laboratory testing results that contained errors due to data conversion corruption?
If you read the article through it will also be easier for you to comprehend the Massachusetts ITD policy decision (which includes OOXML along with ODF as approved document formats). The decision represents a momentous failure of intent by open document and information freedom-fighters...but the guilt should rest with the self-centered ODF Community.
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