Openness, ODF, and OOXML from Sam Hiser

Sam Hiser has put together a comprehensive essay comparing the Open Document Format (ODF) standard and Microsoft's Office Open XML (OOXML) standard.  Sam is vice-president and director of business affairs for the OpenDocument Foundation, so has an obvious bias.  It is, however, a timely and very useful document considering the amount of government lobbying Microsoft is doing.  Sam compares the two standards based on:

• Specification development practices
• Usefulness of the specification from an implementors perspective
• Clarity of IPR rights
• Breadth of implementations (many ODF implementations on many platforms versus one partial OOXML implementation)

The document is an excellent summary.

Comments

[Cyrus Mack]

I would love to read the essay, but I don't think you used the right link :)

-Cyrus
http://www.bytesfree.org/

[stephe]

bugger. sorry. fixed.