The recent decision by the Open Document Foundation to substitute the World Wide Web Consortium's Compound Document Format in place of the format it was set up to promote, the Open Document Format, has sparked a contentious debate over what shape the format should take.

Okay, lets get one thing straight… Repeat after me: “The Open Document Foundation has nothing to do with the Open Document Format”!

"The commonwealth of Massachusetts has done a 180 degree turn and decided to support Microsoft's Office Open XML format in addition to the OASIS Open Document Format."

I’ve been so busy with other stuff that I’ve only peripherally been paying attention to an ongoing meme on the Internet about how the World Wide Web Consortium’s Common Document Format (CDF) had been identified by the OpenDocument Foundation as a superior document format to the OpenDocument Format that it had been backing for so long.

The OpenDocument Foundation has announced its plans to sever itself from participation in or further advocacy of its namesake office document format in favor of the World Wide Web Consortium's XHTML (Extensible HTML)-based Compound Document Format.

"The Document Freedom Day (DFD) is a global day for Document Liberation with grassroots action for promotion of Free Document Formats and Open Standards in general. The DFD was initiated and is supported by a group of organisations and companies, including, but not limited to, the Free Software Foundation Europe, ODF Alliance, OpenForum Europe, IBM, Red Hat and Sun Microsystems, Inc. On 26 March 2008, the Document Freedom Day will provide a global rallying point for Document Liberation..."

The first international workshop of Open Document Format (ODF) public sector users took place in Berlin on 29-30 October 2007, hosted by the Foreign Office of the Federal Republic of Germany.

March 26 is Document Freedom Day (DFD). On March 26th, events and activities across the world will be held to promote adoption of free document formats such as the Open Document Format (ODF).

One of the topics I'm behind writing on is the state of IPR concerns and standard setting in China in general, and the current status of UOF – China's "Uniform Office Document Format" entry in the document format sweepstakes – in particular. I recently spoke at two conferences in Beijing, and got back up to speed in this regard direct from the source.