ODF became an ISO standard in 2006, prompting many organizations and governments to look into it as an effective way to store and communicate information in a way that is interoperable, perennially and widely accessible, as well as vendor independent. This attention prompted Microsoft to submit its own competing format for office automation documents, OOXML, to ISO under a fast-track process which is slated to come to a vote at the end of august. Both specifications are very different in scope, and the details of how they are constructed is a very good illustration of the fact that a specification must comply with a large number of conditions if it wants to be called a "standard".

Autor: David Megías

Dr. David Megías achieved the PhD in Computer Science in July 2000, the Master Engineering degree in Computer Science (Advanced Automatic Control) in October 1996 and the Engineering degree in Computer Science in July 1994, all of them by the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona (UAB). He has made research stays at the Department of Engineering Science de la University of Oxford (with a grant by the Comissionat per a Universitats i Recerca de la Generalitat de Catalunya) and at the Departamento de Ingeniería de Sistemas y Automática de la Universidad de Valladolid, in both cases as an invited lecturer. He was an assistant lecturer at the UAB from September 1994 to October 2001. Since October 2001, he is a lecturer at the UOC (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya) with a permanent position. Since October 2002, he is also the co-director of the International Master Program in Free Software which is currently offered at the UOC. His current teaching activities are mostly related to free and open source software and has participated in several forums and conferences concerned with this field. His current interests include Free Software and Open Source Software, security and copyright protection schemes, and process control. He has published several research papers in different international conferences and journals. He has participated in several national joint research projects both as a contributorand as a manager (main researcher). He has also experience in European projects, such as the European Network of Excellence of Cryptology (joint group with the Universidad de Vigo) of the FP6.

Autor: Georg Greve

Georg Greve is the Legal Policy Coordinator of the SELF project. He is Initiator and president of the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSF Europe). Georg studied physics at the University of Hamburg, Germany, where he finished in January 2001 with an interdisciplinary computer-science and physics diploma thesis in the nanotechnology area. Since 1998 he has been busy as European speaker for the GNU Project; an activity which also led him to write the Brave GNU World, a monthly column about Free Software that is published in up to 10 languages on the web and printed in several magazines around the world. During his work for the FSF Europe Georg Greve has (among other things) participated in the Commission for Intellectual Property Rights in the UK and gotten particularly involved in the long-term and strategic issues of Free Software in the social, legal and economic area. He participated as member of the German governmental delegation to United Nations (UN) conferences on the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) as representative of the WSIS coordination circle of German civil societies and is also the person responsible for the AGNULA (IST-2001-34879) project in FSF Europe.

Autor: Nagarjuna G

Dr. Nagarjuna G. is an M.Sc. in Biology, M.A in Philosophy from Delhi University, and Ph.D in philosophy of science from Indian Institute of Technology at Kanpur in India. He joined Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research as a postdoc in 1995 and is working as a regular faculty. Currently he is the head of the computer lab and principal investigator of the knowledge lab carrying out research and development in the area of cognitive science and information technology. His current areas of research are semantic web, knowledge organization, AI, philosophy of science, biological roots of knowledge and modelling complex systems with specific interest in cognitive development. He is coordinator of the gnowledge.org project, a community portal, which is to be launched before the end of 2006. His lab produced a knowledge distribution system, specially crafted for science and mathematics education. He is the author of the system GNOWSYS, which is recognized as an official GNU project by Free Software Foundation, since December 2004. He is a well known advocate of free software and is serving as a Chairperson of Free Software Foundation of India. As an advocate of free software for education and research, he travelled around the country and gave more than 120 speeches/workshops/keynotes during the last eight years. He works with engineering students, who join his lab as interns (final year thesis projects) and do a number of developmental and experimental projects with them every year contributing to development of free software and training. He teaches several graduate courses in philosophy of science, conceptual dynamics and cognitive development.

Autor: Gustavo Boksar