Oracle says it’s playing by open source community rules
By Erwin Oliva
INQUIRER.net
First Posted 10:46:00 05/01/2008
SINGAPORE -- Reiterating its support to the open source community, Oracle Corp. said it has always been playing by the community's rules, not imposing its own standards, an executive told reporters here.
While declining to comment directly on the recent approval of a Microsoft-backed data format by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), the company said it would continue supporting the open standards community.
"We have been supporting the ISO. Our involvement in ISO is not about one against the other," said Shane Owenby, senior director of the Linux and Open Source in Oracle Corp. in Asia Pacific.
Microsoft-backed data format Open XML is now a global standard after receiving the necessary number of votes of approval as an ISO/IEC International standard.
Open XML is a standard format that has replaced the old binary-based format used by Microsoft for its Office suite of applications like Word, PowerPoint and Excel. Using the binary format, documents or files are coded to be read only by Microsoft Office applications. Open XML, however, replaces this and uses an open standard (XML) that can now be opened and manipulated by applications supporting the new format.
Oracle has been part of the rival format pushed by the ODF (open document format) Alliance, which has opposed the open XML format.
Owenby said that file formats "do not drive the business" of Oracle. "But we've participated in the ISO process," he said, stressing that the company has been pushing the open source and open standard envelope since it launched the first commercial database for Linux in 1998.
Oracle has been contributing to a host of open source projects, with Eclipse as one of the more recent one.
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