Standards and Sovereignty: ODF, Interoperability, and Open Access to Standards Documents

posted by Roy Schestowitz on May 22, 2026

• Neowin ☛ LibreOffice bashes Microsoft for "absurd" OOXML format and Excel's handling of dates

  TDF claims that ODF ensures digital sovereignty since it is an open-source format that cannot be controlled by a single vendor. Any document created in this format remains the sole property of the author since no vendor can independently change the format and inconvenience users. It emphasizes that this is very different from Microsoft's OOXML structure used in Office documents, which it says is only "open" on paper, but proprietary in practice.

  LibreOffice's developer notes that OOXML was developed behind closed doors at Microsoft, and it is actually an insult to the community since it isn't transparent and discourages consultation, especially considering that its explainer document is over 7,500 pages long. TDF has highlighted that OOXML is not versioned and does not rely on independent standards. In fact, it alleges that Microsoft utilizes proprietary formats whenever possible.

  The developer has also taken a dig at Microsoft's handling of dates with OOXML. It says that OOXML is so absurd in complexity that it cannot even handle the Gregorian calendar. Excel, in particular, gets dates wrong frequently, incorrectly identifies the year 1900 as a leap year, and when it "gets dates wrong, no other software does it worse."

• Heise ☛ The Winner in the End: Open Document Format is the Standard

  20 years ago, the decisive ISO vote took place for the Open Document Format the decisive ISO vote: In early May 2006, ISO and IEC approved the format as a future international standard. ODF was then published on November 30, 2006, as ISO/IEC 26300:2006. At the time, this seemed like a technical detail, but today it appears in a different light. Governments and authorities are once again discussing digital sovereignty, platform dependencies, and long-term archiving. Suddenly, a question that many thought had long been settled is back on the table: Who actually owns digital documents?

  ODF is much more than just the file format of LibreOffice. The standard originated from the idea that documents should be permanently readable, usable independently of vendors, and technically transparent. Two decades later, this approach seems remarkably modern. Many of the problems ODF aimed to solve are now, more than ever, shaping the daily lives of large organizations: proprietary cloud platforms, difficult data migrations, and the question of how information can be archived over decades.

  ODF was never just a technical project. The format quickly became a symbol in the conflict between open standards and closed ecosystems – and one of the most politically contentious issues in the IT industry of the 2000s.

• April ☛ Interoperability at the Heart of Germany's Strategic Autonomy Policy [iophk: Interoperability == Open Standards (usually)]

  The German federal government has approved the operational launch of a common national technology platform for German public services. This coherent system of standards appears to place interoperability at the heart of Germany's strategic autonomy policy with regards to I.T. This is an interesting approach that April welcomes, and hopes it will inspire the French strategy, in particularly to move towards the systemic use of open formats.

• EFF ☛ Victory! End-to-End Encrypted RCS Comes to Apple and Android Chats

  With this update, conversations that take place between Apple’s Messages app and Google Messages on Android will be end-to-end encrypted by default, as long as the carrier supports both RCS and encrypted messages (you can find a list of carriers here). RCS messages are a replacement for SMS, and in 2024 Apple started supporting it, making for a marked improvement in the quality of images and other media shared between Android and iPhones.

• APNIC ☛ IP geolocation is hard: The draft report from the IAB workshop on IP address geolocation

  The IETF Datatracker has received the first draft of the report from the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) workshop on IP Address Geolocation. The workshop at the end of 2025 brought together researchers, protocol and standards experts, operators, and the IP geolocation providers in registry and industry, to discuss the issues.

• APNIC ☛ Open Fibre Data Standard and the visibility gap in network resilience

  Informal conversations among network operators from different organizations surface important themes and conversations that may not happen within their organizations. The importance of visibility in building resilient systems was an important topic of conversation at the New Zealand Network Operators’ Group (NZNOG) 2026.

  Recent events in New Zealand have made the relationship between visibility and resilience difficult to ignore. Cyclone Gabrielle (2023) exposed structural weaknesses in how well-deployed fibre infrastructure is understood. In several cases, what appeared to be diverse paths were, in reality, closely coupled, following the same transport corridors or sharing common physical risks.

  This is not a new problem, but it is becoming more impactful as our societies become more connected.

• LLVM Discussion Forums ☛ [RFC] Open Access to Standards Documents

  Roughly speaking, under the usual ISO and IEC rules, all committee-related documents are only accessible to committee members or other members of their organization. There was an historical experiment run by JTC1, the committee within ISO which is responsible for technology-related standards, to open access to committee documents. This experiment was successful but was never finalized with ISO, so the documents were left freely available in practice but ISO had expected access to be closed off again. Fast forward about 30 years later: ISO realized there were far more documents with open access than they thought and so they’re trying to close off all access to those documents moving forward. JTC1 has been working to convince ISO and IEC about the importance of open access for several years now, and as part of that conversation, ISO is seeking testimonials from companies and open source organizations on the importance of open access to standards documents. The documents in question are: working drafts, committee drafts, and proposals (N-numbers documents, but also potentially P-numbered papers including things like issues lists and defect reports); other documents such as meeting minutes, agendas, and committee policies will become closed access and the final version of the standard will remain closed access as it is today.