India must embrace Open Document Format (ODF)

Information should be competitively priced, innovative, and easily available to the widest range of people, now and in the future

The Open Document format (ODF) is an open XML-based document file format that enables the retrieval of information and exchange of documents (including spreadsheets, charts, and presentations) without regard to the application or platform in which the document was created – both now and in the future

ODF was developed as an application-independent file format by OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards), a vendor-neutral standards organization. It is available for implementation and use free of any licensing, royalty payments, or other restrictions. ODF has been an approved OASIS standard since May 2005, and has been implemented by multiple vendors in a variety of products as well as in multiple open source software projects. Further, the ODF specification is available for use by any developer, including proprietary software vendors as well as open source developers

Recently, on August 13th, 2007 Government of Malaysia formally adopted Open Document Format (ODF) within country’s public sector.

In July this year, Japan became the first country in the Asia-Pacific region to embrace open software standards. Last August, the United Nations urged countries in the region to adopt the ODF standard

India should adopt ODF, which when adopted, would significantly change the way data is managed in the nation and help increase IT penetration in the country, leading to a narrowing of the digital divide and independence from particular vendors. India is one of the members of ODF Alliance, a seminar held in India discussed issues related to open and vendor specific document standards in detail. But official announcement from the Government side, embracing the open standard is still pending.

From the ODF alliance site: “As documents and services are increasingly transformed from paper to electronic form, there is a growing problem that governments and their constituents may not be able to access, retrieve and use critical records, information and documents in the future. Through the use of a truly open standard file format that can be implemented by numerous and varied applications, the ODF Alliance seeks to enable governments and their constituents to overcome the issue and provide access year after year”

Meanwhile, the ODF alliance said that most of the private companies are choosing members either from Microsoft partners or companies having large businesses commitments with the IT companies. The panel will either select ODF or Microsoft's Open Office Extensible Mark Up Language (OOXML) as the standard for word processing documents. A voting is planned on August 23, 2007 in which members will be asked to vote against each format a `Yes' or `No'. Along with India, 123 countries have to vote on the issue to make one of the two formats an ISO standard by September 2, 2007.

Software giants like; Oracle, Google, have already joined IBM-Sun camp to support ODF.