• 

• Linux Foundation Legal

  The Linux Foundation's legal program provides the Linux ecosystem with important information on licenses, standards and patent issues, reducing confusion and fostering further innovation and adoption of Linux.

• Categories

  • Legal

• Archives

  • December 2008
  • November 2008
  • October 2008
  • September 2008
  • August 2008
  • July 2008
  • June 2008
  • May 2008
  • April 2008
  • March 2008
  • February 2008
  • January 2008
  • December 2007
  • November 2007
  • September 2007

• Subscribe RSS

Regular visitors to the LF site may recall that in late August we posted a statement urging eligible standards bodies around the world not to vote in favor of approving Microsoft’s OOXML document format standard for adoption by ISO/IEC JTC1, the global standards body that has approved many IT standards, including our own Linux Standards Base. You can read the reasons behind that decision in a blog entry by Amanda McPherson, which you can find here.

Since then, things have remained “active,” to put it mildly, in the ongoing battle between OOXML and the already-ISO/IEC approved OpenDocument Format, or ODF, supported by many LF members. This week, a rather bizarre announcement was made by an organization called the OpenDocument Foundation, which was formed to support ODF. Here’s the story, which continues after the introduction at my Standards Blog.

Wednesday I attended the W3C Technical Plenary Day festivities, which included a brief press conference with Tim Berners-Lee, interesting insights into the W3C’s work in progress and future plans, and much more (you can view the agenda here). And it also gave me a chance to sit with Chris Lilley, a W3C employee whose responsibilities include Interaction Domain Leader, Co-Chair W3C SVG Working Group, W3C Graphics Activity Lead and Co-Chair, W3C Hypertext CG. What that combination of titles means is that he is the “go to” guy at W3C to learn what W3C’s CDF standard is all about.

CDF is one of the very many useful projects that W3C has been laboring on, but not one that you would have been likely to have heard much about. Until recently, that is, when Gary Edwards, Sam Hiser and Marbux, the management (and perhaps sole remaining members) of the OpenDocument Foundation decided that CDF was the answer to all of the problems that ODF was designed to address. This announcement gave rise to a flurry of press attention that Sam Hiser has collected here. As others (such as Rob Weir) have already documented, these articles gave the OpenDocument Foundation’s position far more attention than it deserved.

The most astonishing piece was written by ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley. Early on in her article she stated that, “the ODF camp might unravel before Microsoft’s rival Office Open XML (OOXML) comes up for final international standardization vote early next year.” All because Gary, Sam and Marbux have decided that ODF does not meet their needs. Astonishing indeed, given that there is no available evidence to support such a prediction.

So what is this CDF, and should it be considered to be an alternative to ODF? Here’s what Chris Lilley had to say, reconstructed from my notes (in other words, this is not a direct quote):

So we were in a meeting when these articles about the OpenDocument Foundation and CDF started to appear, and we were really puzzled. CDF isn’t anything like ODF at all – it’s an “interoperability agreement,” mainly focused on two other specifications - XHTML and SVG. You’d need to use another W3C specification, called Web Interactive Compound Document (WICD, pronounced “wicked”), for exporting, and even then you could only view, and not edit the output.

The one thing I’d really want your readers to know is that CDF (even together with WICD) was not created to be, and isn’t suitable for use, as an office format.

The rest of the story continues here.

Popularity: 42% [?]

Comments

• Andy Updegrove

  

  Andy Updegrove is a partner and founder of Gesmer Updegrove LLP, a Boston-based technology law firm, and has represented and helped structure more than 80 worldwide standard setting, open source, promotional and advocacy consortia over the past 20 years. He has also represented hundreds of both emerging as well as established technology companies, and is the founder and editor of both the popular website http://www.consortiuminfo.org and the widely-read Standards Blog

• Karen Copenhaver

  

  Karen Copenhaver is a partner in Choate, Hall & Stewart LLP ‘s Business & Technology practice focusing on technology transfer and licensing of intellectual property with a specific emphasis on open source business models. Most recently, Copenhaver was executive vice president and general counsel at Black Duck Software, Inc.