Debate Simmers on Why ODF Foundation Shuttered its Doors

He also pointed out that the Massachusetts market requirements will continue to pose a problem for the implementation of ODF wherever Microsoft Office workgroups dominate day-to-day business processes.

But Andy Updegrove, a partner with Boston law firm Gesmer Updegrove and editor of the ConsortiumInfo.org standards blog, does not agree with this assessment. "I have no reason to doubt that Gary [Edwards] passionately believes in his approach, but I also have no reason to believe that the many people and vendors that support the existing path are any less determined to make ODF a success," Updegrove said.

"I would chalk this up to a difference of opinion over approach, and certainly not to a situation where the Foundation wanted to satisfy Massachusetts and the others did not," he said.

Updegrove also believes that the Foundation was all about its Da Vinci converter and little else. "From everything I can tell, the Foundation was always primarily about a converter, perhaps even from the very beginning, rather than actually promoting ODF as such. The fact that they abandoned ODF entirely once the converter didnt work out would seem to confirm this," he told eWEEK.

Read more here about why Massachusetts threw its weight behind Office Open XML and the Open Document Format.

Edwards also maintains that changes to Oasis membership rules, which eliminated the 501(c)(3) category and made only employees, rather than volunteers, eligible to be sponsored, helped force the Foundation to shutter its doors.

At its height of activity, the Foundation sponsored 28 active members, but in December 2006, when Edwards went to renew the Foundations Oasis registration, he found that the 501(c)(3) category had been eliminated. However, he was assured that if he registered as a corporation it would not alter or change its 501(c)(3) sponsorship of volunteers.

To read about why Microsoft accused IBM of limiting choice for interoperability and standards, click here.

That was important as, under IRS rules, a 501(c)(3) non profits volunteers are the equivalent of employees, and Oasis rules stated that a corporation could only sponsor employees as participants, he told eWEEK.

But, in late February 2007, Oasis told the Foundation that there were complaints from other members about its "excessive" sponsorship. So, in March 2007, Edwards says he culled all the dead wood, effectively cutting the foundation membership to 15 active members. "I thought we were in compliance at that point," he said.

But then, in April 2007, Oasis enforced the corporate registration rules, insisting that only Foundation employees could be sponsored as Oasis participants. "Arguments ensued. It was bitter. We lost. This reduced us overnight from 15 very active members to just two employees. There was not much we could do, so the decision was made in April to simply let the Foundation fade off into that long goodnight," he told eWEEK.

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