The answer is no! The purpose is not to support an academic developed file format, but to help the pour users who by accident get hands on a document from Microsoft Office 2007.

The Candle light vigil demands India to appeal ISO approval of ooxml based on its comments and no vote. We also demands the Department of IT to draft a clear national policy for the use of Free standards for data storage.

This programme is planned as a starting point for various events & awareness campaigns on Document freedom.

When: 15 April 2008, 6pm

Groklaw calls it “slime, slime, slime,” but what it truly might be is a simple case of bullying and intimidation. We saw this in Malaysia and days some ago we saw this India (heaps of similar examples are cited therein, including the story about jilted CIOs).

From this point onwards, it is worth starting to argue in favour of ODF because of its merits rather than its ISO rubber stamp. Microsoft has single-handedly redefined the meaning and significance of ISO. It rendered ISO moot.

Twenty-two organizations across 60 countries are taking part in DocumentFreedomDay (DFD) to raise awareness about what happens when formats are no longer supported by proprietary software.

The editor of the Open Document Format standard has written a letter that strongly supports recognizing Microsoft's Open Office XML file format as a standard, arguing that if it fails, ODF will suffer.

The Malaysian Administrative Modernization and Management Planning Unit (MAMPU) has announced that the agency will be migrating to OpenOffice.org office suite as well as adopt the OpenDocument Format (ODF). In addition, Microsoft Office is to be phased out by end of 2008.

As the March 29th voting deadline on OOXML approaches, Red Hat has announced its support of Open Document Format (ODF) instead of Office Open XML (OOXML).