Redmond once branded Linux the “cancer,” but the real infection was already inside Microsoft Office: proprietary formats designed to keep users and governments dependent forever.
Posts published in “Standards”
From wall sockets to file formats, our lives depend on shared rules that no one owns. LibreOffice's Italo Vignoli argues that open standards are not just technical details, but civic commitments.
Proprietary formats, rendering choices, and font restrictions don’t just create interoperability failures, they make open alternatives appear unreliable and keep institutions locked in.
The app is easy to replace. The hard part is the years of documents trapped in one company’s format -- especially after that company ceases to exist.
An open letter from the Document Foundation argues that Euro-Office isn’t what it claims—and may reinforce Microsoft’s ecosystem instead.
ODF was built in the open, under public standards bodies, to be fully implementable by anyone. OOXML’s “standard” status hides a legacy format that only Microsoft can truly unlock.
Germany’s federal “Deutschland-Stack” puts Open Document Format at the center of its digital infrastructure plans.
Ironically, when the EU asked for feedback on new tech rules, it locked the process to dear old Microsoft. A fast, focused campaign forced officials to add an open format instead.
Since this article was published on Friday, the European Commission has added an Open Document Format version of the feedback spreadsheet, meeting the request described in this article.
So you think Word’s DOCX format is fine because it carries an ISO standard label? Think again. LibreOffice co‑founder Italo Vignoli explains why Microsoft’s OOXML has never been, and likely never will be, a true standard.