Open Document Format

This fund is retired, but not because this topic is no longer important. Help reboot it and donate

The standardisation of the Open Document Format (ISO 26300:2006) took five years of hard work within OASIS. In 2006 the unanimous approval of this XML-based universal Office-format within the International Standards Organisation ISO meant a clear slope change point for innovation and market reach of open standards and open source in general. Governments, companies and individuals quickly recognised the enormous importance of having a way of encoding information that is truly portable across applications, operating systems and vendors as well as not having any problems crossing the barriers of time.

ODF spawned a collective move away from company-dictated file formats that can only be adequately opened by a single application from a single vendor. We now understand that we want open standards that are oblivious with respect to the software used to generate or edit them. Good formats like ODF make global interoperability and the free flow of information a reality, which is a real breakthrough for the entire ICT world. The huge amount of active support ODF received from the IT industry itself --and from society at large too-- is a testimony to that fact.

Society doesn't change overnight, although the pace is astounding. In the past twenty years the lack of a mature open standard for information exchange at the document level has caused a very unhealthy de facto monoculture with fallout well beyond the operating system and productivity software where things started. These negative consequences move far beyond the economic realm and range from an increased digital divide and innovation poverty to large-scale cyber criminality and botnets such as Storm that are able to almost push countries off the internet.

A self-imposed social acceptance of closed formats is sometimes difficult to break through, but with the dominant binary formats of the past having been deprecated by their vendors themselves the situation looks very bright. The market has learned from the past, and with the file format decoupled from the applications there is no learning curve, a low cost of switching and most of all: an open market for innovation. And that is what we are seeing: great innovations taking place because people can move into the containers they were locked out for decades.

Open Document Format is vendor independent and its proven technology. It starts at no cost with full functionality and fidelity. And there are no hidden tricks, no opportunities for sabotage of inconvenient competitors. Because many of the leading players in the ODF arena (such as IBM Lotus Symphony, LibreOffice, Calligra, KOffice, AbiWord, the various plugins for Microsoft Word) are open source applications, there is 'full disclosure' and a very efficient 'best of breed' model built around ODF.

NLnet foundation sees ODF as a key technology for the future of our society, which is why we have installed the ODF fund that significantly invests in in the area of ODF. From tools for collaboration to contributing to standardisation, from education and raising awareness to developer libraries -- we will be doing our best to contribute where possible.

This fund is retired, but do have a look at our current theme funds and open calls.

Activities within this theme

• Consumer information
  • OpenDocumentFormat.org, a portal to educate users and policy makers on ODF
• Libraries and testing
  • OpenDoc Society, an association to bring together best practises around office productivity tools
  • Officeshots.org, a Quality Assurance and interoperability testing platform for developers and designers
  • WebODF, a versatile open source library to render office documents in the browser, on mobile phones and tablets
  • convert ODF to xliff and gettext for translation.
  • ODF Software Recipes, a platform to compare software libraries and share solutions
  • ODFkit, an experimental libary based on WebKIT that can be used for ODF processing
• Improved product support
  • Calligra installer for Windows
  • Improve support for ODF in Koffice
  • An open source ODF viewer for Symbian OS
  • ODF load and save in KOffice
  • ODF metadata in KOffice
  • ODF revisions in KOffice
  • Load and save ODF frame previews in Calligra (Koffice)
  • improving AbiWord ODF support
  • Numbertext - Moneytext, implement OpenFormula
• Change tracking in OpenDocument Format
  • representing changes in ODF
  • standardization of changes in ODF
  • creating tracked changes in ODF by document comparison
  • ODF track changes/tables in Koffice
  • support for proposed ODF change tracking in AbiWord
• • Grants for various developers to visit ODF plugfests