GOC

Microsoft (News - Alert) Corp. and Turbolinux Inc., a major distributor of Linux software suites in Asia, have announced that Turbolinux is joining the open source Open XML-ODF translator project on Sourceforge.net with the goal of offering guidance on, and helping to develop, the new Open XML-ODF translators in Chinese and Japanese that the project plans to release.

An expansion of the Open XML-ODF translator project will provide customers in China and Japan with more choice in the document formats they use.

“We support the work the Sourceforge open source community has done to date and felt it was important to become a part of this amazing collaborative effort,” Koichi Yano, CEO of Turbolinux, said in a press release published on the website of Turbolinux. “Our hope in joining this project is to not only contribute our own expertise in working with ODF files, but also to enable choice in formats for our own customers in the near future.”

The translators will be developed in stages and made available on Sourceforge under a Berkeley Software Distribution license, allowing other developers to take advantage of the translators for their own commercial projects.

Microsoft had first announced the open source Open XML-ODF translator project last July. In the past six months alone, the project has produced a Microsoft Office Word translator, and beta translators for Microsoft Office Excel and Microsoft Office PowerPoint, the latter of which will be completed early next year. The translators have reportedly been downloaded over 230,000 times since the project began.

More information on obtaining versions of OpenOffice, which support the Ecma Office Open XML File Formats can be found at www.turbolinux.com.

More information on the Ecma Office Open XML File Formats can be found at www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/ecma-376.htm.

More information on the ODF format can be found at www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=office.

Microsoft has invested in several projects in the past several months. The projects, including another open source project to develop translators designed to benefit Microsoft Office customers in China who need to work with the Unified Office Format (UOF) standard, are in support of facilitating customer choice in the marketplace.

For more details on the UOF project, visit www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2007/may07/05-20UOFODFPR.mspx.

For more details about Microsoft’s support of customer choice, visit www.microsoft.com/interop/letters/userchoice.mspx.

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Calvin Azuri is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To see more of his articles, please visit his columnist page.