Two decades ago, an ad hoc coalition of major companies (mostly acting behind the scenes), open source developers, and technology freedom advocates led an effort to challenge Microsoft for control of the desktop. The weapon at their disposal was the OpenDocument Format (ODF), a new standard that promised to allow documents, spreadsheets and presentations to be traded between competing software programs for the first time. After several heroic years, that quest eventually failed, but a new one may be taking shape today, with its seeds planted in Denmark – or perhaps in Greenland. Continue reading →