Erwin Tenhumberg of Sun Microsystems is "Dispelling Myths Around ODF" on his blog. The mother of all myths comes first:
ODF is controlled by Sun
Considering how actively a company like IBM is involved in the standardization process and the whole file format debate, I doubt that IBM would allow Sun to control ODF. Nevertheless, Sun is not in the position to control ODF.
The TC accepted multiple proposals that are not implemented in OpenOffice.org, and did so without larger discussions.
Sun has only three votes out of 8 to 10 in the TC. Even if Sun wanted to prevent that certain proposals get added to the specification, Sun would not have the power to do so.
Indeed, SUN also kept a low profile in the Open XML standardization process. Consequently IBM is described by the supporters of OOXML standardization as the party that pulls all strings behind the community efforts against OOXML standardization. It seems hard to believe that a community contests Open XML because of its weaknesses that were not invented by the opponents. SUN didn't make much fuzz about the attempt to parallelize the existing International Standard with a second format specification DIS 29500. However, here Tenhumberg takes on the ECMA core argument for a second format:
Many people also believe that ODF is incompatible with Microsoft Office or that Microsoft Office documents cannot be represented in ODF. As many people know, OpenOffice.org has a very high level of compatibility with Microsoft Office. Some users even use OpenOffice.org to “repair” Microsoft Office files that cannot be opened in Microsoft Office any more. Microsoft Office compability has been a key goal for OpenOffice.org for a very long time due to the current market situation. However, OpenOffice.org uses ODF as the default file format and therefore all features that currently can get imported by OpenOffice.org from Microsoft Office files can be represented in ODF. As a consequence, even though Microsoft has not been participating in the ODF TC at OASIS, ODF can already represent close to all Microsoft Office features that someone typically uses for the creation of day-to-day documents.
