Document format wars rage on

Source: NST Online, Local News
Date: 2008/03/26

Document format wars rage on

KUALA LUMPUR: Forget American Idol or even Akademi Fantasia.
If you want some real action, check out the geeky document format wars that is currently waging internationally as well as at home.This battle, which is being closely followed by the tech-savvy in Malaysia, involves a two-cornered fight between computer giants IBM and Sun Microsystems with the OpenDocument Format (ODF) and software giant Microsoft with their Office Open XML (OOXML).Both formats are open source, which means their programming codes are open to everybody. But this battle has also raised debates on the government's neutrality when it comes to standards.
In Malaysia, the OpenDocument format is said to be favoured by the government while the private sector prefers the Office Open XML formats.An industry expert told the New Straits Times yesterday that the government should not take sides on the issue."The public sector or the government should not be used in a free market economy to effectively promote the products of one foreign investor against another. There is no local document format being developed by anyone here so we should not side with one foreign format against another as both ODF and OpenXML are foreign," he said.His views were also shared by research assistant Ain Ashura. "Since the government gave a 'yes' vote to the adoption of ODF as an ISO standard last year, and since OpenXML also met with the technical criteria to be an ISO standard, the government should also give a 'yes' vote to the adoption of OpenXML as an ISO standard," she said.