Dear Europe: Germany has shown the way forward, by making the Open Document Format (ODF) mandatory within its sovereign digital infrastructure.
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Dear Europe: Germany has shown the way forward, by making the Open Document Format (ODF) mandatory within its sovereign digital infrastructure. Now it's time for other countries to do the same! https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2026/03/23/dear-europe/ #foss #opensource #freesoftware #openstandards
@libreoffice Finally a good decision. Open files and platforms are the base for all subsequent actions.
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@libreoffice I mean, there's also #markdown and #latex. ODF isn't the only one, but it's certainly one of the important standards.
@fallbackerik Of course, those formats are useful too.
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@libreoffice This has been the truth in multiple countries for some time, including in Portugal, but the governments don't always follow their own mandates for themselves. In Portugal @ansol monitors violation of this type of mandate for government institutions:
@DiogoConstantino @libreoffice @ansol That works fine until Microsoft shows up at the top executives' offices with black briefcases in hand and disappears without ever coming back out.
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@DiogoConstantino @libreoffice @ansol That works fine until Microsoft shows up at the top executives' offices with black briefcases in hand and disappears without ever coming back out.
@DiogoConstantino @libreoffice @ansol We’ve seen it happen here in Germany—in Munich, to be exact. For 13 years, the city government had relied on Linux. For 13 years, apart from a few minor issues, there were no complaints. Then a new mayor came along, along with Microsoft and a big black briefcase, promising to move the company’s German headquarters to Munich if the city switched to Windows.
Well, what can I say? Munich is once again in the hands of the rip-off artists from Redmond.
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@libreoffice @jonxion the 2018 presentation is interesting, lots of good details. OOXML crudely reinventing so many other standards, like SVG, proves why it's problematic.
All I could think was, "So LibreOffice had to implement all of this for its .docx importer?!" Hats off to the devs who worked on that.
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@jonxion@mstdn.social @libreoffice@fosstodon.org because ODF is the standard that’s actually meant to be implementable by different office suites. So-called OOXML standard is overly complex and favorises Microsoft software by design.
@mkljczk @jonxion @libreoffice
It's been many years since I actually read the specifications, but I was not convinced that ODF was particularly good in this regard this when I did.
OOXML had a bunch of things like the infamous 'typeset like Word 97' entry, but they were clearly marked in OOXML as for legacy compatibility (like emoji in Unicode, until the Unicode Consortium went silly). It also has a bunch of things like assuming everyone knows how the Windows GDI drawing model works. It is an objectively terrible standard.
ODF and OOXML were both rushed through standardisation too quickly and both were bad specifications.
ODF was much shorter than OOXML and that was partly because a lot of things were underspecified, people implementing it just did what OpenOffice did and had to use OpenOffice as a reference because it was the only way to know what you needed.
It is uncontroversial to say that OOXML is terrible. But it is a logical fallacy to say 'X is bad, Y is not X, therefore Y is good.
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Dear Europe: Germany has shown the way forward, by making the Open Document Format (ODF) mandatory within its sovereign digital infrastructure. Now it's time for other countries to do the same! https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2026/03/23/dear-europe/ #foss #opensource #freesoftware #openstandards
@libreoffice We
really did that? Hard to believe. -
Dear Europe: Germany has shown the way forward, by making the Open Document Format (ODF) mandatory within its sovereign digital infrastructure. Now it's time for other countries to do the same! https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2026/03/23/dear-europe/ #foss #opensource #freesoftware #openstandards
All well and good until citizens in places like the UK, Canada, America, et. al., start demanding clean drinking water for all from their taps...
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Dear Europe: Germany has shown the way forward, by making the Open Document Format (ODF) mandatory within its sovereign digital infrastructure. Now it's time for other countries to do the same! https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2026/03/23/dear-europe/ #foss #opensource #freesoftware #openstandards
@libreoffice, мої вітання!
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All well and good until citizens in places like the UK, Canada, America, et. al., start demanding clean drinking water for all from their taps...
@f800gecko @libreoffice huh? What has that got to do with document formats?
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@mkljczk @jonxion @libreoffice
It's been many years since I actually read the specifications, but I was not convinced that ODF was particularly good in this regard this when I did.
OOXML had a bunch of things like the infamous 'typeset like Word 97' entry, but they were clearly marked in OOXML as for legacy compatibility (like emoji in Unicode, until the Unicode Consortium went silly). It also has a bunch of things like assuming everyone knows how the Windows GDI drawing model works. It is an objectively terrible standard.
ODF and OOXML were both rushed through standardisation too quickly and both were bad specifications.
ODF was much shorter than OOXML and that was partly because a lot of things were underspecified, people implementing it just did what OpenOffice did and had to use OpenOffice as a reference because it was the only way to know what you needed.
It is uncontroversial to say that OOXML is terrible. But it is a logical fallacy to say 'X is bad, Y is not X, therefore Y is good.
@david_chisnall @mkljczk @jonxion @libreoffice No "layout before format before content" document type is ever good. But that's besides the point at this stage. Really happy at least one more vendor lock-in tool is off the table.
Now for the rest of Europe to truly adopt this (both odt and ods).
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Dear Europe: Germany has shown the way forward, by making the Open Document Format (ODF) mandatory within its sovereign digital infrastructure. Now it's time for other countries to do the same! https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2026/03/23/dear-europe/ #foss #opensource #freesoftware #openstandards
@libreoffice that’s something many countries and even counties in the US can get behind. Especially when they come asking for tax revenues to fund vector control of the #anopheles mosqiito
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Dear Europe: Germany has shown the way forward, by making the Open Document Format (ODF) mandatory within its sovereign digital infrastructure. Now it's time for other countries to do the same! https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2026/03/23/dear-europe/ #foss #opensource #freesoftware #openstandards
@libreoffice #Canada is pretty much hopeless in this regard, sorry. I wish it were otherwise! Alas, it's pretty much no #elbowsUp, unless it's a selection between two competing whiskey bottles on a liquor store shelf - one being American whiskey, the other #Canadian whiskey. Prove me wrong, Canada! Canadians will smash each other's teeth out in a hockey fight, but there will be no changing of Office software on the office computers!
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Dear Europe: Germany has shown the way forward, by making the Open Document Format (ODF) mandatory within its sovereign digital infrastructure. Now it's time for other countries to do the same! https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2026/03/23/dear-europe/ #foss #opensource #freesoftware #openstandards
@libreoffice as afar as I can see it (in the document by the IT-Planungsrat), this is only one of several formats for "semantic technologies" with the aim "networking, exchange and retrieval of data" [my translation]. Other formats in that group are RDF, OWL, JSON, XML, CSV... this is very broad... am I missing a document describing specific use cases?
and on a side-note: listing CSV here is showing how broad this category is, so I really hope there is something more specific.
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