Recently, The Document Foundation published an open letter to European citizens. We asked Euro-Office – the new coalition forming around a European alternative for productivity – whether ODF (the Open Document Format) would be its native document format.
Unfortunately, we have not yet received a reply, and this confirms – at least in part – the suspicion that Euro-Office will join Microsoft’s allies in a strategy to lock in European citizens, who will see their content snatched away by a company that – in words only – presents itself as a defender of digital sovereignty.
With the open letter, we have raised an issue that the general debate is not yet grasping: digital sovereignty is not determined solely by the terms of the licence and the location of the server, but by the format in which documents are created, stored and exchanged.
We were able to pose our question publicly, with confidence, because we represent something extremely solid – support for the single open and standard format: ODF – which has been built up over twenty years by many people, whose names rarely appear in press releases.
The foundations underpinning the political moment
Germany has established by law that ODF is the mandatory format for public administration, whilst the Interoperable Europe Act has made open standards a legal obligation across all EU Member States. Consequently, policymakers in Berlin and Brussels are now championing arguments that once circulated only on technical mailing lists and in standardisation committee rooms.
None of this came out of nowhere.
Before there were mandates, there were organisations funding the development of ODF when no politician and no law required it. Here, The Document Foundation has always been at the forefront, alongside various companies in its ecosystem.
Before there were legislative victories, there were the members of the OASIS ODF Technical Committee, who maintained, defended and evolved the specification against all odds: hostile standardisation battles, years of institutional indifference, and a market that had decided – in deference to monopolistic positions – that the matter had already been settled in favour of the proprietary OOXML format.
Before there were announcements of coalitions and summits on sovereignty, there were users who chose ODF and continued to choose it, year after year, accepting the challenge of the incompatibility scientifically imposed by OOXML as a price worth paying to retain control and ownership of their own content.
This is the foundation upon which every recent political achievement rests.
The legislation cites a standard that exists and is maintained. The arguments on interoperability point to a format that works, is implementable and has a community behind it. The questions we are now able to ask publicly – of institutions, coalitions and the ecosystem – are possible because the answer to the question “does open document interoperability work?” has been provided by all those people who did not wait for institutions to wake up after years of hibernation to prove it.
The funders of the ODF format
Developing and maintaining an international standard is not a free labour of love. It requires legal infrastructure, technical expertise, constant organisational commitment and the patience to operate on timescales that no quarterly reporting cycle would recognise as rational.
The organisations that funded the development of ODF – The Document Foundation and its predecessors and partners – have made a long-term commitment to the principle that the infrastructure of written communication must not be the proprietary asset of a single supplier. A commitment that is now being confirmed at a legislative level, the credit for which goes – largely – to all those who made it before it was available.
The OASIS ODF Technical Committee
Standards do not maintain themselves. Behind every version of the ODF specification – from the initial 1.0 to the current 1.4 – there are people who have dedicated their time and professional expertise to a slow process largely invisible to all those who ultimately benefit from its results.
The OASIS ODF Technical Committee worked both during the controversies over ISO standardisation – the period when the approval of OOXML threatened to render the entire ODF effort politically irrelevant – and during the long years when market share data offered little encouragement.
Despite this, it produced a technically coherent specification that is genuinely implementable and designed – unlike its rival – with interoperability as a fundamental principle rather than an afterthought.
Today, when a politician identifies ODF as the standard to be adopted by their administration, they are honouring the results of that work, which deserves to be mentioned and recognised in all its importance.
The users who chose ODF
All the people who saved in ODF format when it would have been easier and more convenient to use OOXML.
All the people who explained to colleagues, clients, and procurement officers why document format is a fundamental issue.
All the people who put up with the problems – requests for files in “Word” format and questions about compatibility – but still chose the harder but more consistent path.
All these users have kept ODF alive as a living format, not just as a specification. They have generated interoperability experiences, reported bugs and provided real-world usage data. They have demonstrated that ODF is not just a theoretical commitment but a practical daily reality for hundreds of thousands of people in every sector and every country.
All these users were, in the strictest sense of the term, ahead of their time. They were already implementing the policy that Germany has just legislated. They were practising the interoperability that the EU is now making mandatory.
And they arrived at this through personal conviction rather than institutional duty, and then held their ground for twenty years, whilst the institutions caught up with a culpable delay.
Thank you
To the funders, the members of the technical committee and the users: what is happening today at a political level is a belated public recognition of the work you have carried out in silence, without fanfare and without thanks, and silently enduring the comments of those who did not understand, or perhaps did not want to understand.
You are no longer a niche group. You are the vanguard that has proven the validity of a concept, and that has made it possible for those politicians who realised that your example was the one to follow – and not that of the lock-in loyalists – to make their case.
Today, The Document Foundation can stand before the European institutions, coalitions and the wider ecosystem, and ask difficult questions about the sovereignty of formats because you have built the foundations upon which we stand. The rest of the world is catching up to a position that you have held for twenty years.
All of this deserves recognition. Thank you.