Category: LibreOffice

I decided to start the current campaign, with one blog post per week focusing on the different aspects of Open Document Format, to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the standardisation by OASIS, which happened in May 2005.

My hope was to raise the interest around ODF, which is the document format that every conscious user of office suites should adopt in order to maintain full control on his intellectual property (even if we are not professional writers or researchers, the content of our documents is our intellectual property, and we have the right to decide when, how and with whom we want to share it).

My articles were targeting LibreOffice users, as they have the privilege – over other office suite users – of creating documents (and I am not referring only to text, but also to spreadsheets and presentations or drawings) with the only program adopting ODF as native document format.

I wanted to strengthen their understanding of ODF, and explain in detail the enormous value of the open and standard document format they are using in comparison with the closed and proprietary Microsoft office document format, which is unfortunately the most used worldwide to maintain Microsoft lock in and reinforce Microsoft monopoly.

Software supporting OOXML – the technical name of the closed and proprietary Microsoft office document format – as their native document format are in fact strengthening Microsoft lock in just because in their paramount ignorance of the real situation – today, OOXML is the only lock in tool available to Microsoft – they protect Microsoft rather than protecting their users. In reality, they are enemies of their own users, as they use Microsoft handcuffs to prevent them to own and control their intellectual property.

Unfortunately, the absolute majority of office suite users are not aware of the issues – for their intellectual property – related to the closed and proprietary Microsoft office document format, and are just victim of the irresponsible choice about the native document format made by developers of OnlyOffice and WPS Office, and the likes.

Of course, given Microsoft monopoly on office suites, programs must support OOXML to their best, as LibreOffice does, to “steal” Microsoft stronghold on intellectual property, and give it back to legitimate owners, i.e. users of Microsoft office series suites, whatever the name, and of their accomplishes.

While I was trying to explain all this with my blog posts about ODF, something unexpected happened: several journalists picked up the contents of the articles and relaunched them on their media, showing that there is still hope for a sane attitude about document formats, rather than the current “comfortable” behaviour of choosing the most frequently used document format without even thinking to the consequences of the evil strategy associated to it.

Based on this unexpected – and extremely positive – outcome, I have decided to revive the ODF Advocacy project (which was killed twice in the past) by launching ODF News (https://www.odf.news), where I will write about ODF and publish ODF supporting documents.

ODF News will go live in January 2026, to prepare for the 20th anniversary of ODF being approved as ISO/IEC 26300.