Big Blue Joins OpenOffice

IBM has joined the OpenOffice community and intends to contribute accessibility and other enhancements. This may be predictable to those following IBM’s commitment to the open source movement, but to governments and large organizations this support will make adopting the open document standard a more viable option.
M$ has been trying to squeeze more time out of its office suite through tightly integrated collaboration tools, but now IBM can effectively counter with a Lotus suite based around the ODF standard.

Anyone who has unzipped an ODF spreadsheet, run an XSL transform and then packed it back up knows the power of open formats. Makes it so easy to do exactly what you want with your data. I can’t wait for the day that I can send an ODF without hearing, “Sorry, I can only open Word format.”