It looks like Microsoft might have weazled it’s way back into MA’s graces again. They’ve made some vague statements about making their office format a standard XML and promising not to sue some users.

In a horrible piece of journalism, Forbes can’t seem to decide what the difference
between open formats, open standards, open source, and Open Office are.

That’s a whole lot of “open”’s but still no excuse for shoddy journalism. Let me see if I can clear this up. An Open Standard is generally a standard that anyone can use (or at least pay for). Open Document is an open standard that is also free to use. It’s well specified and contains all the “stuff” needed for document formatting. Open Office is a suite created by Sun Microsystems, among others, that uses the Open Document standard as it’s default.

Now that you know, you’ll understand that Open Document has nothing to do with open source, which is a software licensing scheme in which the source code of software is available to the recipient of the binary code, commonly for no additional charge.

For the record, Forbes, these aren’t “open source formats” that we’re speaking of. Possibly intentional mis-phrasing such as that clouds issues worse than aged Wiskey at a political convention.