Customers in China and Japan will soon have more choice in the document formats they use as a result of a an expansion of the Open XML - ODF translator project. Microsoft Corp. and Turbolinux Inc., a major distributor of Linux software suites in Asia, today announced that Turbolinux would join the open source Open XML - ODF translator project on Sourceforge.net with the goal of providing guidance on and helping to develop the new Open XML - ODF translators in Chinese and Japanese that the project plans to release.
The translators will be developed in stages and made available on Sourceforge under a Berkeley Software Distribution license, enabling other developers to take advantage of the translators for their own commercial projects.
We support the work the Sourceforge open source community has done to date and felt it was important to become a part of this amazing collaborative effort,¡É said Koichi Yano, CEO of Turbolinux. ¡ÈOur hope in joining this project is to not only contribute our own expertise in working with ODF files, but also to enable choice in formats for our own customers in the near future.
Microsoft first announced the open source Open XML - ODF translator project last July. In the past six months alone, the project has produced a Microsoft Office Word translator, and beta translators for Microsoft Office Excel and Microsoft Office PowerPoint, the latter of which are due to be completed early next year. The translators have already been downloaded more than 230,000 times since the project began.
The promise of the Open XML - ODF Translator project ¡½ enabling customer choice and document interoperability around the world on an industry wide level is being realized day by day,¡É said Jean Paoli, general manager of Interoperability and XML Architecture at Microsoft. Customers in Asia will have the ability to choose whatever format makes sense to them, and we are glad to have Turbolinux joining the effort because it has a unique understanding not only of ODF as an OpenOffice provider, but of the needs of customers in China and Japan today.
Microsoft has made several investments over the past several months in support of facilitating customer choice in the marketplace, including announcing another open source project to develop translators designed to benefit Microsoft Office customers in China who need to work with the Unified Office Format (UOF) standard.
Further details on the UOF project can be found at
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2007/may07/05-20UOFODFPR.mspx.
More information about Microsoft support of customer choice can be found at
http://www.microsoft.com/interop/letters/userchoice.mspx.
http://www.turbolinux.com