Article on open formats

Gervase Markham has written an interesting article about open document formats. I did a bit of lurking on the bugzilla development lists for a while and saw Gervase in action–quite a programmer and also interested in the end user’s experience. I think he raises some important issues–if html had been owned by a company, the internet (as the web is commonly known, even though it’s only a part of the internet) would not be where it is today. If Microsoft Word (or WordPerfect) had opened up their document specification (or worked with other interested parties on a common one), other companies could have competed on features and consumers would have benefited. More on OpenDocument, including a link to a marked up version of a letter from Microsoft regarding the standard.