Microsoft to offer open source document format

[peat moss]

Microsoft on Thursday bowed to pressure from governments to offer new free open source software that will allow its Office suite of programmes to handle documents in rival formats.

The company said it would develop tools to build a “technical bridge” between its own Open XML document format and the OpenDocument format (ODF).

“In addition to being made available as free, downloadable add-inns for several older versions of the Microsoft Office system, the translation tools will be developed and licensed as open source software,” said Microsoft.

Source: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/dbbb9ef2-0cd...0779e2340.html

[4play]

Microsoft have basically been told by various goverments around the world to use an open format or they will drop office.

So they are gonna release a plugin that will be built by the community and have no support from microsoft what so ever. It will also be a plugin so nobody is gonna download it and docs will still be standard and goverments will be happy that they can now use open document.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/odf-converter