The Winner in the End: Open Document Format is the Standard
The Open Document Format has been an ISO standard for 20 years now. It stands for digital sovereignty and vendor independence – and is more relevant than ever.
(Image: Moritz Förster / KI / iX)
20 years ago, the decisive ISO vote took place for the Open Document Format the decisive ISO vote: In early May 2006, ISO and IEC approved the format as a future international standard. ODF was then published on November 30, 2006, as ISO/IEC 26300:2006. At the time, this seemed like a technical detail, but today it appears in a different light. Governments and authorities are once again discussing digital sovereignty, platform dependencies, and long-term archiving. Suddenly, a question that many thought had long been settled is back on the table: Who actually owns digital documents?
ODF is much more than just the file format of LibreOffice. The standard originated from the idea that documents should be permanently readable, usable independently of vendors, and technically transparent. Two decades later, this approach seems remarkably modern. Many of the problems ODF aimed to solve are now, more than ever, shaping the daily lives of large organizations: proprietary cloud platforms, difficult data migrations, and the question of how information can be archived over decades.
ODF was never just a technical project. The format quickly became a symbol in the conflict between open standards and closed ecosystems – and one of the most politically contentious issues in the IT industry of the 2000s.
The Idea Behind ODF: Documents as Open Data Structures
In the early 2000s, proprietary binary formats dominated the office world. Microsoft's DOC, XLS, and PPT files were considered in fact industry standards, but their internal structures were only partially documented. Anyone who wanted full compatibility had to buy Microsoft Office.
ODF took a different approach. The format consistently relied on XML and was intended to be fully openly specified. Content, formatting, and metadata were kept separate. The goal was not only readability for humans but also automated processing by scripts or databases.
Today, this sounds self-evident. However, in the early 2000s, it represented a fundamental paradigm shift. XML was then considered a universal exchange format for structured data. ODF transferred this idea to office documents.
Internally, an ODT file consists of several XML files. “content.xml” contains the actual content, “styles.xml” the formatting definitions. Metadata is in “meta.xml", application-specific settings in “settings.xml”. A ZIP container bundles these components. Therefore, an ODT file can be renamed to “.zip” and opened with any standard compression program.
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The architecture is more reminiscent of modern web technologies than classic office formats. Content and presentation are separate – similar to HTML and CSS on the web. This modularity not only facilitates analysis but also automated processing, conversion, and archiving.
Microsoft later adopted this principle for DOCX and XLSX. Office Open XML is also internally based on ZIP containers and XML files. The difference was less in the basic architecture than in the question of how open and interoperable the specification actually is.
From OpenOffice Format to ISO Standard
The roots of ODF lie with Sun Microsystems. The then-owner of StarOffice released the source code in 2000 as OpenOffice.org and needed a standardized file format for the free office suite.
Standardization began at OASIS, an industry consortium for open standards, in 2002. The goal was a vendor-neutral document standard. In 2005, OASIS adopted ODF 1.0, followed by ISO standardization as ISO/IEC 26300 in 2006. This marked the first time there was a fully open international standard for office documents.
From today's perspective, it is remarkable how early topics emerged that are now being discussed again under the keyword “digital sovereignty.” Even then, proponents argued that states should not tie their documents to individual vendors. Document formats ultimately determine which software an organization must use and how accessible data remains in the long term.
Authorities often have to keep documents for several decades. Vendor-specific formats pose significant risks: specifications change, software products disappear, licensing models change. Furthermore, when documents migrate to cloud platforms, their technical foundations often evolve outside the control of government institutions. An open format was intended to mitigate this problem.
