The recent decision by the Open Document Foundation to substitute the World Wide Web Consortium's Compound Document Format in place of the format it was set up to promote, the Open Document Format, has sparked a contentious debate over what shape the format should take.

I’ve been so busy with other stuff that I’ve only peripherally been paying attention to an ongoing meme on the Internet about how the World Wide Web Consortium’s Common Document Format (CDF) had been identified by the OpenDocument Foundation as a superior document format to the OpenDocument Format that it had been backing for so long.

Rob Weir of IBM has just posted a lengthy reply to concerns raised by Marbux and Gary Edwards (OpenDocument Foundation).

"The commonwealth of Massachusetts has done a 180 degree turn and decided to support Microsoft's Office Open XML format in addition to the OASIS Open Document Format."

Over the last several weeks, the Open Document Foundation has taken back its support for the Open Document Format, and has confused many of its friends. It has now closed up shop.

You must admire their tenacity. Gary Edwards and the pseudonymous "Marbux". The mythology of Silicon Valley is filled with stories of two guys and a garage founding great enterprises. And here we have two guys, and through blogs, interviews, and constant attendance at conferences, they have become some of the most-heard voices on ODF. Maybe it is partly due to the power of the name?

Okay, lets get one thing straight… Repeat after me: “The Open Document Foundation has nothing to do with the Open Document Format”!

Massachusetts' open formats policy is off to a slow start with only 250 of the government's 50,000 PCs outfitted with the necessary technology. Since the policy was publicly introduced last year, the plan has seen resistance from state employees and Microsoft, lobbying heavily against the format change.

When in mid-October 2007, the OpenDocument Foundation announced that the World Wide Web Consoritum-backed Common Document Format (CDF) was the heir-apparent to what it believed was a dead-on-arrival OpenDocument Format, many confused the ODf to be one in the same with the ODF and the latter to have one foot in the grave.