Did the OpenDocument Foundation recently shutter its doors for good <A HREF="http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2223042,00.asp?kc=EWKNLNAV112907STR2">because it was unable to convince Oasis to support its converter,</A> known as Da Vinci? Or was it because OpenDocument Format was simply not designed for the conversion of Microsoft Office documents, applications, and processes? The debate on these issues continues two weeks after foundation members confirmed the organization had shut down.

Marino Marcich, the managing director of the ODF Alliance, an advocacy group of vendors, academic groups and technical organizations, told eWEEK that the Foundation had proposed advances to Da Vinci, its plug-in for providing interoperability between Microsoft's binary formats and ODF, in the Oasis OpenDocument Technical Committee. Oasis, the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards, is the body that "owns" the Open Document Format specification.