So you thought OpenOffice.org controlled ODF? Think again…

These news are a week old, but I thought it would be wise to have the dust settle a bit before writing about them.
What was announced last week? The OpenOffice.org project had opened a project called the ODF Toolkit. What this project was all about, really, was to design a toolkit for ODF Documents. It included, obviously, the capacity the create applications producing ODF. But the goal was much broader than that; the ODF Toolkit was and is a piece of the essential “plumbing” for processing ODF documents.

In this regard, Sun (as the main copyright holder and steward of the OOo project) decided to have it hosted elsewhere than on OpenOffice.org and emphasize the open aspect of this project. As such, IBM joined the announcement and the project. This is to show that ODF is not “an OpenOffice-thing” as we heard too much in the past.

All in all, this is a very good move. The license of the toolkit has been changed to the Apache License 2.0, which opens the project to the whole Apache ecosystem (and to IBM as well) but still keeps the compatibility with the OpenOffice.org project (OpenOffice.org 3.0 uses the LGPL v3 license).  On a strategic point of view, the toolkit aims to be the  center for contributions related to ODF applications and ODF platforms. On the OpenOffice.org level, this allows some indirect contributions, as the ODF Toolkit will have obvious influence in the future of OpenOffice.org. Meanwhile, you can learn more and contribute to the future of OpenOffice.org through the ODF @ WWW project, which aims to explore new ways to edit ODF documents and new use cases for OpenOffice.org.

Enjoy!