The OpenDocument Foundation, founded five years ago by Gary Edwards, Sam Hiser, and Paul "Buck" Martin (marbux) with the express purpose of representing the OpenDocument format in the "open standards process," has reversed course. It now supports the W3C's Compound Document Format instead of its namesake ODF. Yet why this change of course has occurred is something of a mystery.
Hiser has made several entries on his blog recently about the foundation's change in position, and there is an explanation of the reasoning for it on the front page of the foundation's Web site, in a long, rambling discourse. If I read it correctly, Hiser and the foundation are saying the ODF is no good because it doesn't work with Microsoft document formats, while CDF will.
In a story for Linux.com two years ago, Hiser defends the ODF against attacks in a letter written by Microsoft's Alan Yates, saying that it "contains a farrago of false declarations and is full up with psychological transference in which the gamut of Microsoft's own malpractices are attributed to their rivals. In its way, the letter is a typical Microsoft communication."
http://www.linux.com/feature/121034