This month marks the fifth anniversary of the OpenDocument Format (ODF) as an industry standard. On May 1, 2005, ODF (OpenDocument v1.0 specification) was approved as an OASIS Standard, marking the beginning of a campaign for document freedom that many people probably didn't expect would be so durable, or so significant. After all, who really cares about document formats, right?

ODF was created on the principles that interoperability and innovation were paramount, and that these are based on open standards. Not coincidentally, ODF's creation coincided with the growing support of open ICT architectures, which grew from the Web model where the standardization of HTML, an open, royalty-free standard, enabled the Web to be an open platform that enabled much innovation on top of it. The key was interoperability, or the ability of multiple parties to communicate electronically, without the need to all run the same application software or operating system. Also critical to the development of ODF was the introduction of OpenOffice.org, the open source office suite that first implemented the format, and the rise of XML as a widely supported foundational standard for describing structured data...