Sun Microsystems is backing European Union efforts to standardize office document formats, including a proposal that would enable people to switch easily between Microsoft-based documents and those created with open-source software.
In a recent letter to the European Commission, Sun President Jonathan Schwartz said he agrees with a recommendation by the EC's Interchange of Data between Administrations unit to establish the format used by OpenOffice.org, an open-source productivity suite based on Sun's StarOffice, as an international standard.
The proposal is one of the guidelines issued by the IDA in May to address growing concerns about the interchange of electronic documents. The Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards is already working on making OpenOffice.org's handling of XML (extensible markup language) a standard, called the OASIS Open Document Format.
News source: C|Net News.com
