On 1 May 2005, Open Document Format (ODF) was recognized as the open standard for office applications. The Document Foundation, the organization behind LibreOffice, recently celebrated the 20th anniversary of ODF. Before ODF, there was de facto only one format for office applications: the binary blob of Microsoft office formats: doc, xls, ppt, etc. Only because of the XML-based ODF, it forced Microsoft to create its XML-based formats, those docx, xlsx, and pptx.
Against this backdrop, I live an academic life. In this supposedly to be idealist life, I have to send e-mails with the online Microsoft Outlook interface; I have to communicate with my colleagues over Microsoft Teams; All mission critical documents for my academic life are in Microsoft office formats stored on Microsoft OneDrive and are edited with Microsoft Office 365; Half of the software development for my organization is conducted on Github, an Microsoft-owned service; Some of my colleagues (or perhaps all other people around the world use OpenAI’s ChatGPT, a partially Microsoft-owned technology; I use Linux but I still need to dual boot to the unused Microsoft Windows partition on my organization-supplied Laptop to update it regularly to fulfill the so-called IT security requirements; I just came back from a stupid nightmare of writing a manuscript in LaTeX but the journal only accepts Microsoft Word. I needed to convert our LaTeX article to Quarto and converted it further to Microsoft Word format; and checked with my coauthors with both online Microsoft Office 365 and offline Microsoft Office to ensure our manuscript is compatible with both…
Many people, like me, would say ODF has failed its mission to fight the Microsoft dominance. But please understand that this fight is an uphill battle to begin with. Despite the adoption by the UK Government, EU, NATO, etc., the world does not take ODF seriously. We are still living in a technology space with a strong Microsoft dominance, if not more dominance than 20 years ago. Even if we are not talking about just Microsoft, just look at how many times you use anything from Google, Meta, and Amazon.
Call me an idealist, or at least a critical realist, I have been the maintainer of the R package readODS for almost 10 years. I have written on this blog over the last few years on the difficulties of making the ODS (the ODF offering of spreadsheet format) support on R usable. Despite the fact that from readODS version 2.0 onward it’s being vastly improved from the 1.0 series in terms of speed and features, ODS is still far from a good format to work with on R. For example, reading and writing ODS files with readODS are still much, much, much slower than readxl and writexl.
Similar to the battle ODF has to fight, readODS is also fighting an uphill battle. Do you need to read and write ODS files with R? Probably don’t. (Even for me, in most of the time, I don’t) But I read a quote from Eliane Domingos, the Chair of the board of directors at the Document Foundation, recently and she said:
“ODF is much more than a technical specification: it is a symbol of freedom of choice, support for interoperability and protection of users from the commercial strategies of Big Tech. In a world increasingly dominated by proprietary ecosystems, ODF guarantees users complete control over their content, free from restrictions.”
readODS’s existence is for its symbolic meaning. I believe it stands for digital sovereignty, the ability to have control over our own digital destiny. readODS and many R packages prove that R, a GPL-licensed free software, also supports open file formats such as ODS, Parquet, XML, YAML, JSON…