For anyone not already aware, there was a push in the early 2000s to require government documents to be in a standard format rather than giving a specific vendor (Microsoft) unfair advantage (official government endorsement). LibreOffice (OpenOffice at the time) used the standardized ODF format, which should’ve pushed many European governments to switch to an open source office suite. Instead, Microsoft bribed a bunch of people to push through their “OOXML” format as a standard, even though it was just a snapshot of Office’s behavior, bugs and all.
There is another twist to this in that the OOXML format didn’t actually define the bugs in the format and MS Office itself didn’t actually follow the officially defined specification they pushed through. This inevitably led to every product that tried to make use of the official spec (e.g. Open Office) failing to be compatible with MS Office. It took the open source devs many years to properly duplicate the buggy mess that is the real MS Office formats.
For anyone not already aware, there was a push in the early 2000s to require government documents to be in a standard format rather than giving a specific vendor (Microsoft) unfair advantage (official government endorsement). LibreOffice (OpenOffice at the time) used the standardized ODF format, which should’ve pushed many European governments to switch to an open source office suite. Instead, Microsoft bribed a bunch of people to push through their “OOXML” format as a standard, even though it was just a snapshot of Office’s behavior, bugs and all.
https://web.archive.org/web/20100805232754/http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20070827111019189
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument_standardization
There is another twist to this in that the OOXML format didn’t actually define the bugs in the format and MS Office itself didn’t actually follow the officially defined specification they pushed through. This inevitably led to every product that tried to make use of the official spec (e.g. Open Office) failing to be compatible with MS Office. It took the open source devs many years to properly duplicate the buggy mess that is the real MS Office formats.