Cus Productions

On May 3rd OpenDocument finally became an ISO standard, ahead of Microsoft's Open Format.

OpenDocument is an open source document format for use by office applications. It was created by a consortium of vendors and users, and is licensed to be used by anyone, whether the application is open source or not. Previous formats such as those used by Microsoft Office, were proprietary. This leads to vendor tie-in across multiple corporate levels.

An Open format allows people to be able to choose whichever software best suits their needs (whether it's free or not) and still be able to exchange documents with others. Better still, it means that noone needs to upgrade to the latest and greatest office software in order to keep up with everyone else's document formats – as long as a document follows the ISO standard, it should be readable by software for years to come, regardless of what version of the software exists.

This is of particular interest to governments and other entities who require long-term storage of documents (eg the church). The last thing they need is to perform constant upgrades to their documents so that they're readable on the desktop. Alternatively, trying to open a document written years before should be possible given that the format shouldn't have changed – just the software that edits and displays it.

For more information, visit the OASIS homepage.
The Wikipedia entry for the OpenDocument format.