Whenever a user, a government, a school or a business chooses the format in which to store and exchange its digital documents, it is not merely making a technical decision, but is placing a bet on the kind of digital infrastructure on which it will depend in the future. In this sense, ODF and OOXML are not two equivalent options on the same shelf, but two radically different solutions: one geared towards a future of openness, interoperability and digital sovereignty, and the other towards a past of defending a vendor’s dominant market position through user lock-in. ODF: designed to be open and transparent Open Document Format was conceived from the outset to be an open standard. It was designed and developed by the community under the auspices of OASIS, and subsequently ratified by ISO, to be implemented by anyone, on any platform, without royalties, without hidden dependencies and without the permission of any single company. These are not trivial technical details, but a statement of political and economic strategy embedded within the format itself. ODF is based on a clean XML schema, easy to read even by non-technical users and reusable. Colour naming follows standard web conventions, and its architecture
The German federal government has quietly taken an extremely significant step: hidden amongst the technical specifications of the Deutschland-Stack – the rules that will govern the sovereign digital infrastructure supporting public administration at all levels of government, from federal ministries to local council offices – there is a short but highly significant line. Under the technological pillar “Semantic technologies and real-time analysis”, the document mandates the use of just two document formats: ODF and PDF/UA. That is all. Two open, vendor-neutral formats, defined by international standardisation bodies. OOXML, Microsoft’s closed, proprietary format, is not on the list. What is the Deutschland-Stack? The Deutschland-Stack is the German federal government’s project for a sovereign, interoperable digital infrastructure that complies with European standards. It is neither a pilot project nor a policy discussion paper, but the result of a coordinated decision between the Digital Minister, the Federal Chancellery and the Chancellor, backed by the coalition agreement. The document sets out the standards that will govern how all federal public administrations, at all levels, build, procure and manage their digital systems, and envisages concrete implementation by 2028. It is worth reading its architectural principles carefully. “Made in the EU first.” Reduction of lock-in effects.
The Document Foundation (TDF), the non-profit entity behind LibreOffice, welcomes the inclusion of the Open Document Format (ODF) as a mandated standard format in Germany’s Deutschland-Stack, the federal government’s sovereign digital infrastructure framework for all public administrations. The Stack, published by the German Federal Ministry for Digital and State Modernisation (Bundesministerium für Digitales und Staatsmodernisierung), establishes the technical standards for a shared, interoperable and sovereign digital infrastructure serving all Germany’s public administrations. Under the framework’s “Semantic Technologies and Real-Time Analytics” pillar, ODF and PDF/UA are explicitly named as the two mandated document formats, to the exclusion of proprietary alternatives. “This is not a recommendation or a preference, it is a mandate,” said Florian Effenberger, Executive Director of The Document Foundation. “Germany’s decision to anchor ODF at the heart of its national sovereign stack confirms what we have argued for years: open, vendor-neutral document formats are not a niche concern for some technology specialists and FOSS advocates. They are a fundamental infrastructure for democratic, interoperable and sovereign public administrations.” The Deutschland-Stack is grounded in a set of principles that align with TDF’s long-standing advocacy positions. The framework adopts a “Made in EU first” principle, requires open interfaces and local data storage,
Last week, the European Commission published the draft guidelines for the CRA and opened a comment session open to all stakeholders until the end of March. In its first version, the consultation page allowed users to download the draft guidelines and related communication in PDF format, and the feedback template in proprietary XLSX format only. For this reason, we protested through a post and an open letter to the European Commission, asking that the feedback template also be provided in the open and standard ODS format. Within 24 hours, officials from DG CONNECT—responsible for the CRA—responded positively to our request and added the template in ODS format. This is an important first step towards the interoperability that proprietary formats do not allow, and indeed seek to limit by making the DOCX, XLSX, and PPTX formats increasingly different from a standard with the addition of unnecessary complexities. To all those individuals who insist on considering OOXML a standard because it has been approved by ISO, and to all software that supports OOXML by using it as the default format, we remind you that you are going against not only your own interests but also the interests of all citizens of the
Comments continue to be posted on articles that refer to blog posts on OOXML and related topics, from users who claim to support FOSS but in fact choose proprietary software, for reasons that have nothing to do with the support they claim to offer. These users share a preference for the proprietary OOXML document format and the Microsoft 365 ribbon interface, demonstrating on the one hand incompetence regarding formats and on the other hand subservience to proprietary marketing. Some of them even use the definition of “standard” for the ribbon interface, which in reality is neither a standard nor a good example of ergonomics. In reality, if ODF is LibreOffice’s first advantage from an open source perspective, the flexibility of the user interface is probably the second. Let’s start with an in-depth analysis of these two important advantages. Native support for the ODF format LibreOffice uses ODF as its native format rather than as a second choice, handled in an approximate manner with the aim of disqualifying ODF in the eyes of users, as Microsoft, OnlyOffice and WPS Office do. This means that documents are transferred perfectly without the risk of silent data loss, formatting corruption or schema compromise. Users
Many interpreted the last article in this series as an attack on Microsoft for using the OOXML format against users’ interests. However, this was only one of my objectives, as I also wanted to raise users’ awareness of fake open-source software, such as OnlyOffice, which partners with Microsoft in a strategy to lock users in. Users are already aware of the advantages of standard, open formats because they access sites every day whose content is accessible thanks to the HTML format. This is a standard, open format that was first developed and then defended by its inventor, Tim Berners-Lee. He prevented Microsoft from transforming it into a proprietary format with Internet Explorer 6. This forced users to have two versions of a site: one in a standard format and one in a proprietary format. Fortunately, Microsoft’s strategy failed in the case of HTML because the W3C – unlike the ISO – never recognised the changes to the format “forced” by Internet Explorer as valid. This was because Internet Explorer did not display sites in the standard format correctly. Ultimately, this forced the company to develop a browser that complies with all standards, thus allowing users to choose their preferred browser
