Celebrating ODF… and a lot of other good things.

Tomorrow, I’ll be flying with Melissa to our honeymoon somewhere in the Mediterranean. It will be our first and well deserved vacations for over a year now. In this warm and quite busy month of August (my friends at Mandriva will know what I mean), I am reminded of something I haven’t mentioned in a while by Simon Phipps. Simon wrote a great article I can only encourage you to read.

Simon’s point is that because of ODF, Microsoft was forced to open up its MS Office platform to open standards. And he’s right, but as I’m reading his lines I again realize that, as an old Chinese wise man once wrote, “Do turn back from time to time while on your way, and contemplate the road you’ve already travelled”. I’ve given an interview recently where I was expressing my frustration at the limits in our work towards ODF’s massive adoption. Well, that’s the other way of looking at the glass, it seems, and it has been made possible by all the ODF ecosystem and their relentless efforts to encourage and advocate ODF and open standards. Because of them, because of us, Microsoft had to actually open up, and not in a trivial way. It takes an enormous effort to achieve just that, and I’m proud to have been part of this team all along.

Today, the story continues with LibreOffice (check our our latest releases, the 3.6 and the 3.5.6) and an ecosystem that can finally look forward more innovation and a stronger ODF. We will by the way celebrate ODF in Berlin through the ODF Plugfest that will take place alongside the LibreOffice Conference. Many challenges remain intact and are left untouched. But we will address them and open standards shall prevail, on the web just like on the desktop. This is the way things work, especially in I.T. Openness and freedom work.