Microsoft announced on Wednesday that the next update of its Office software will include support for Open Document Format (ODF) and Portable Document Format (PDF). The company says this update will be available in the first half of 2009.
The International Herald Tribune quotes Marino Marcich, director of the Open Alliance, a group of 480 companies, governments and organisations that use ODF. He said the integration was overdue. "This shows the acceptance that ODF has gained around the world."
Marcich thinks Microsoft was forced to include ODF support. "If they had not, they would have lost more clients."
Microsoft had earlier worked on a plug-in to provide ODF support for its Office software. According to Marcich, this has never been made commercially available. He told the International Herald Tribune that with Microsoft's dominance of operating system and desktop markets, time tends to work in it's favor. In its 2007 financial year, which ended last June 30, Microsoft made a profit of 14.1 billion dollar.
Commenting on the announcement on his blog, OASIS attorney Andy Updegrove writes that as of yet it is unknown under what terms the application programming interface (api) will be made available? "Until Microsoft announces to the contrary, the most logical assumption would be Microsoft's existing Open Specification Promise. That commitment is fine for proprietary vendors and non-commercial open source use, but incompatible with commercial open source products."
News agency Reuters quotes Thomas Vinje, a Brussels based lawyer who has represented clients opposed to Microsoft. Vinje said the ODF announcement was meaningless unless the company makes ODF the Office default. If ODF is not the standard its presence "won't matter because the vast majority will not use it. That was the experience in the U.S. case," he told Reuters, referring to a case which found Microsoft in violation of the Sherman antitrust act.
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