� Why multi-party stewardship of the OpenDocument Format matters so much | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com: "The state is obviously comfortable with letting its goal of sovereignty trump any questions of technical prowess and here's why.
One of the beautiful things about the degree to which ODF is open is that developers are free to do whatever they want with it. For example, they can deconstruct it and come up with some new derivative. They can also extend it to make it better (in the developer's and maybe even the end users' eyes). They can remake it however they want to. It's exactly that freedom to innovatively remix the format that eventually leads to improvements in the standard and hundreds if not thousands of interesting solutions that are in some way, shape, or form, connected with the ODF ecosystem. The same goes for the PDF format (Adobe just says you can't call it 'PDF' if you remix it in a way that's no longer 100 percent compatible with the PDF format). This stands in stark contrast to Microsoft's license for Office XML Reference Schema which has some open attributes. For example, it is open to royalty-free use by any developer. But, Microsoft's license demands 100 percent compliance of its licensees thereby preventing any sort of remixing of the technology. "
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