Yesterday was announced the ODF Alliance Chapter Brasil, being the fourth country to create this initiative, after US, India and Poland.
The founder members are the Brazilian offices of IBM, Red Hat and Sun. Jomar Silva, the director, told me this:
My understanding is that the Brazilian [ODF Alliance] operation has the mission to execute the work proposed by the ODF Alliance in our country. We are partners and fight together the same battle, exchanging experiences (and this is a very important point) so lessons learned with migration and adoption of ODF in other countries (governments and companies) may be used here.
Many software support today reading and writing of documents in the OpenDocument format, being OpenOffice.org the most popular. The user gains freedom of choice, becomes able of negotiation, and can choose for the best price-benefit performance. This user-suppliers dynamics works as a fuel for innovation.
ODF, being based on open standards as XML, plus having a free license, plus to be already and ISO standard (two steps ahead of OOXML, proprietary competitor by Microsoft), is a mark in IT’s history, when for the first time the user is truly the independent owner of his documents. This is simply a very powerful idea.
The Brazilian chapter of the ODF Alliance will focus, in its first days, to setup its web site — probably at www.br.odfaliance.org —, and to define policies to accept new members as companies, institutions, user groups and communities.