Story: OOXML expert: ODF standard is broken

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Bottom line: no featureful implementations of ISO/IEC:26300 OpenDocument

One can quibble over the meaning of an "international standard," particularly within the context of the Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade and the Agreement on Government Procurement.

But the fact remains that there are no full-featured editors that write to ISO/IEC:26300 OpenDocument. Numerous governments have adopted ISO/IEC:26300 OpenDocument as their national standards and procurement specifications and Microsoft has committed to conforming ISO/IEC:29500 Office Open XML support in MS Office.

Those facts set up the interesting possibility that Microsoft will have the only office suite that writes to an approved ISO/IEC standard and that the full-featured ODF editors remain legally ineligible for government procurement specifications that designate ISO/IEC:26300 as the standard that must be supported.

In other words, StarOffice, Lotus Symphony, OpenOffice.org and the other clones of the latter's code base are one legal challenge away from being blackballed legally from the government procurement process globally, allowing Microsoft to step into the breach in a few months, if it in fact carries through on its commitment to provide conformant support for ISO/IEC:29500.

To be sure, I do not know whether Microsoft would instigate such a legal challenge. But were I legal counsel for the companies that chose to support ODF v. 1.1 without preserving support for ISO/IEC:26300, I would make sure my clients were aware of just how legally vulnerable they are.

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