The standard for the OpenDocument office file format is approaching version 1.2. The draft of the standard is now available on the web for public review

This is the full text of the essay I wrote for the O'Reilly Open Government book, in which I discuss what open file formats and other digital standards really mean for us, why they are often even more important than Free Software and why Government must lead the way when it comes to their adoption.

ODF Alliance Newsletter for February 2010. Contains latest news regarding open formats, including adoption by various governments around the world.

Complex file formats, such as those used for office documents, inevitably lead to differences in interpretation by application developers. If a user sends a document to someone else who views it in a different application or version, chances are that the output shows some subtle differences or, by bad luck, that the formatting is completely munged.

OpenDocument Format (ODF) suffers more interferences and interruptions from Microsoft and its followers

Heaps of news and observations regarding document formats

One of the interesting corollaries to the fact that Microsoft is making far less money from Windows than it used to – largely thanks to the popularity of netbooks – is that it must depend on other sectors of its portfolio that are still making money to keep the company ticking along.