Microsoft's announcement of last Wednesday for native support for Open Document Format (ODF) is drawing mixed reactions.
The European Commission released a statement on Thursday, saying it would welcome any step by the company towards genuine interoperability, more consumer choice and less vendor lock-in. "In its ongoing antitrust investigation concerning interoperability with Microsoft Office, the Commission will investigate whether the announced support of ODF in Office leads to better interoperability and allows consumers to process and exchange their documents with the software product of their choice."
The French e-business website Neteco contacted Frédéric Couchet, founder and chief executive of April, an French association to promote Open Source software. "As with all Microsoft announcements, we must be prudent and wait to see if it is real or not." Neteco also quotes Loïc Rivière, representing Afdel, an association of French commercial software publishers. "The synergies created with the Open Source community show that there is room for all approaches on the market." Support for more formats helps innovation and increases competition, he says.
In several European countries, such as Belgium and the Netherlands, ODF is a government document standard. According to well informed sources in Belgium, native support for ODF will solve most problems for the Belgian Federal ICT advisory body Fedict. NOIV, the Dutch government project to increase the use of Open Source and Open Standards by Dutch public administrations, welcomed Microsoft's ODF-support, comparing it to that of Sun and the Dutch IT-services company Centric. "Native support for ODF is beneficial for all parties concerned", it said in a statement released on Thursday.
According to the BBC, Georg Greve, president of the Free Software Foundation Europe, remains dubious about "how deep" Microsoft's adoption of the standard would go. "This is definitely a step in the right direction. We have been encouraging Microsoft to support ODF natively for quite a while. As with all things, this will depend to some extent on how they do it."
Greve told the BBC that genuine adoption of ODF would give consumers more choice. "People will no longer need to use Microsoft Office in order to interoperate. People could switch to GNU/Linux and choose OpenOffice or other applications that support ODF, like Lotus Symphony or Google Docs."
© European Communities 2008
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Neteco news item (in French)