October 17, 2007 5:03 AM PDT
Apple's Leopard to support Open Document Format (Updated)
There are so many features listed on Apple's Leopard landing page that it might be easy to overlook this one (which Glyn Moody pointed out): OpenDocument Format, or ODF, support in the new operating system. It's baked right into OS X, and TextEdit will also support both Microsoft Word 2007 and OpenDocument formats.
At some point, Microsoft may also come around to ODF. In the meantime, there's Apple. Innovative as usual.
[UPDATED: As someone pointed out to me in an email, I made a mistake on "OpenDocument" in TextEdit. That appears to be a reference to Microsoft's confusingly named "open" format. But the ODF reference was right.]
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
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Microsoft's Office Open XML (OOXML)'s license is written in such a way that only Microsoft can legally implement it. It's simply because the /last/ thing Microsoft wants is people freely sharing documents amongst iWork, Office, WordPerfect, OpenOffice, Joe's Word Processor, etc.. The nightmare scenario for Microsoft is consumers choosing office software on features/price/value alone. Apple doesn't need proprietary file format lock-in to sell iWork and supporting ODF may give iWork more momentum than it already has.