On Being Open

I was in a meeting today and the discussion turned to Open Source vs. Open Standards; the relationship is complicated and people who care about one or both of these things have to be careful and clear in what they say. Except for Office Suites. There, you have one choice that is neither open-source nor built around open standards (Microsoft Office), and several other choices that are both (StarOffice or OpenOffice or KOffice, all built on the OASIS Open Document format). For documents that are high-value, or long-lived, or you hold in stewardship for your stakeholders, the choice seems like a no-brainer to me. Also, I observe that the community of hackers (I mean that in the good sense) has started to notice that you can do interesting things with office documents; assuming they’re in an open format, of course.