Open Document Format turns 20, but Microsoft Office still reigns supreme
A look back at two decades of ODF, from open source hopes to patchy real-world adoption
It's been 20 years since the Open Document Format (ODF) became a standard, marking a milestone in the push for open, vendor-neutral file formats — and the beginning of a long but largely unsuccessful attempt to loosen Microsoft Office's grip on the desktop.
Back when the consumer internet was young, there were concerns about US-based private companies dominating applications and data. Microsoft Office ruled the roost, and if you wanted to open a file created by it, you had to be running a copy of the suite yourself.
Sun Microsystems (remember them?) came up with OpenOffice, chiefly by building on the codebase of StarOffice, a suite it picked up in 1999 after acquiring German developer Star Division. At the time, some reports joked that the deal cost less than kitting out Sun staff with Microsoft Office licenses, though the real motive was likely strategic as much as financial.
Sun believed that the Extensible Markup Language (XML) format used for OpenOffice documents could make a general open standard for office application files, and submitted it to the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) in 2002. Rather than rubber-stamping the submission, the OASIS Technical Committee put in a few years of work to refine the spec, eventually approving ODF as an official standard on May 1, 2005.
Since then, of course, everyone, everywhere, has gone on to adopt the Open Document Format for Office Applications. Er, well, not exactly. Microsoft didn't take the existence of a recognized standard format for office files lying down and did what it always does in this situation – came up with its own rival version, also based on XML.
Microsoft added these Office Open XML formats to the Office suite and submitted them to the Ecma International standards organization, which ratified them. They eventually replaced the binary file formats used in older versions of Office (though Office apps can still read and write the older formats, as well as OpenDocument files — albeit with occasional formatting issues and feature limitations).
ODF is much more than a technical specification: it is a symbol of freedom of choice, support for interoperability and protection of users from the commercial strategies of Big Tech
Most businesses and consumers simply shrugged and carried on using the default Microsoft file formats, although some governments and public sector bodies specified ODF as their standard for storing and exchanging files.
In 2014, for example, the UK government adopted ODF for "sharing and collaborating," while the European Commission likewise recommended that all European institutes should use the ODF in exchanges with citizens and the national administrations of member states.
Delving further, we find that ODF was designated a mandatory standard within NATO's Interoperability Standards and Profiles (NISP) back in 2008. Separately, a number of governments have also approved it, including India, South Africa, Brazil, and others.
"ODF is much more than a technical specification: it is a symbol of freedom of choice, support for interoperability and protection of users from the commercial strategies of Big Tech," said Eliane Domingos, Chair of the board of directors at the Document Foundation.
"In a world increasingly dominated by proprietary ecosystems, ODF guarantees users complete control over their content, free from restrictions," she added.
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The Document Foundation oversees LibreOffice, a fork of OpenOffice created after Oracle bought Sun, spurring fears that the database giant might might discontinue OpenOffice. Instead, Larry Ellison and company donated it to the open-source umbrella group the Apache Foundation. However, this move did not significantly alter the project's trajectory, as much of the original developer community had already shifted their focus to LibreOffice.
To celebrate this milestone, the Document Foundation says it will publish a series of presentations and documents on its blog that illustrate the unique features of ODF, tracing its history through the development and standardization process. ®
Biting the hand that feeds IT
