Rob Weir: ODF 1.2: Approved as an OASIS Standard

To quote the immortal words of Otis B. Driftwood, “Let joy be unconfined. Let there be dancing in the streets, drinking in the saloons, and necking in the parlor”.

The day has finally arrived. Open Document Format (ODF) 1.2 has been approved. It is now an OASIS Standard.

If you are regular reader of this blog, you know all about ODF 1.2, the enhancements we’ve made with OpenFormula, with RDFa/RDF XML semantic metadata, the digital signature support, etc. I’ve discussed this all before, on this blog and at conferences.

Most likely your office suite already supports ODF 1.2 today. If not, ask your vendor when they will be adding support for it.

ODF 1.2 is a large standard, in four volumes, totaling 1217 pages. It was the work of many hands, over a four year period. I’d like to acknowledge some of the many who contributed to the success of this standard, with apologies in advance for any inadvertent omissions.

First, credit goes to the editors of the ODF 1.2: Michael Brauer, Dennis Hamilton, Eike Rathke, David A. Wheeler and especially Patrick Durusau. With a document of this size and complexity, the work of an editor is as much an engineering exercise as technical writing task. Hats off to our editors for their their accomplishment.

Many companies enabled their experts to participate on the ODF Technical Committee, including prominent technical contributions from Sun/Oracle, IBM, Novell, Microsoft, Nokia and others.

Open source projects should be especially proud of the contributions made to this standard by their project members, especially Gnumeric, KOffice, Calligra Suite, AbiWord, OpenOffic.org, LibreOffice, WebODF, lpOD and the ODF Toolkit.

In some cases, participation of technical experts was sponsored by organizations such as NLnet and the Friends of Open Document/Open Document Fellowship, and their support is gratefully acknowledged.

A full list of TC members who contributed to ODF 1.2, as copied from Appendix B of the standard:

Chieko Asakawa, Waldo Bastian, Thorsten Behrens, Nathaniel Borenstein, Michael Brauer, Pete Brunet, Manuel Cano, Suresh Chande, Robin Cover, Pierre Ducroquet, Jerome Dumonteil, Patrick Durusau, Cherie Ekholm, Ezer Farhi, David Faure, Jean Gouarne, Andreas J. Guelzow, Bettina Haberer, Dennis E. Hamilton, Bart Hanssens, Donald Harbison, Mingfei Jia, Bob Jolliffe, Peter Junge, Kazmer Koleszar, Peter Korn, Jirka Kosek, Robin LaFontaine, Marcus Lange, David LeBlanc, Fong Lin, Jun Ma, Yue Ma, John Madden, Doug Mahugh, Ben Martin, James Mason, Tristan Mitchell, Duane Nickull, Michael Paciello, Ganesh Paramasivam, Eric Patterson, David Pawson, Steven Pemberton, Stephen Peront, Asokan Ramanathan, Eike Rathke, Florian Reuter, Janina Sajka, Svante Schubert, Charles Schulz, Richard Schwerdtfeger, Douglas Schepers, Wei Guo Shi, Michael Stahl, Yan Shi, Jomar Silva, Frank Stecher, Hironobu Takagi, Malte Timmermann, John Tolbert, Elias Torres, Warren Turkal, Jos van den Oever, Alex Wang, Robert Weir, Oliver-Rainer Wittmann, David A. Wheeler, Cheng XiuZhi, Panrong Yin, Kohei Yoshida, Helen Yue, Jin YouBing, Thorsten Zachmann, Thomas Zander and Pine Zhang.

The work of the ODF TC was complemented and amplified by a larger community of related committees and organizations, including the OASIS ODF Adoption TC, the OASIS ODF Interoperability and Conformance TC, the ODF Alliance, the OpenDoc Society and OpenForum Europe.

I’d like to also acknowledge the many who who submitted comments during the unprecedented 270 days that ODF 1.2 was under public review, with notable contributions from Regina Henschel, Leonard Mada, Michiel Leenars, Norbert Bollow, Casper Boemann, Németh Lászl, Søren Roug, and someone known to us only as “Ronnie the Bonnie”. We also received, via the comment list and via official defect reports, valued contributions from ISO/IEC JTC1/SC34 technical experts, including Alex Brown (UK), Murata Makoto (Japan) and Jesper Lund Stocholm (Denmark).

My personal thanks as well to the OASIS staff, especially Chet, Robin, Mary, Carol, Jane, Laurent and Jamie, for their constant support.

Finally, a special thanks Michael Brauer, whose diligent efforts and leadership as ODF TC Co-Chair, made ODF 1.0, 1,1 and 1.2 possible, and whose legacy lives on into our work on ODF 1.3.

When work first started on ODF 1.0, back in December, 2002, the idea of having an open standard for office documents was radical. Every word processor had its own format, and most formats were undocumented or had documentation available only under anti-competitive licenses. ODF challenged that status quo and shook the palace walls of companies whose business models relied on ensuring that your documents were the source of their vendor lock-in. In some places the walls crumbled. Today having an open standard document format is considered to the norm. We’re all open standards supporters now, at least in words.

So a time to celebrate this important accomplishment. There will be no OASIS ODF TC next week. We’ll take the week off from ODF work. But we’ll be back at it the following Monday. We need to start preparing a submission to ISO/IEC JTC1, to refresh ISO/IEC 26300:2006. And we continue work on producing a first draft of ODF 1.3.