The name "Office Open XML" is often mistakenly called ‘Open Office XML" implying a connection to the OpenOffice project which does not exist. This naming confusion has been documented and has occurred numerous times, including by analysts and even in Microsoft press releases and blogs. Since "Open Office" is the pre-existing name, by 6 years, Ecma should choose a new name, less apt to continue this confusion.

We suggest that the name Office Open XML be changed

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Proposed Disposition of DIS 29500 Comment KE-0070 (Modified: 2008-01-11) Based on the wide industry support of DIS 29500 (see list of implementations below) and the volume of public discussion which references “OOXML” or “Open XML”, we believe there is no confusion regarding what “Ecma Office Open XML file format” identifies, nor is there confusion that “Ecma Office Open XML File Format” overlaps with the existing product “OpenOffice.org.” Further, “Office Open XML” or “OOXML” accurately convey several aspects of DIS 29500. The use of the word “Office” acknowledges DIS 29500’s role as a format designed to represent a large corpus of existing “Office documents”, the word “Open” conveys that this format is an open standard to be used by multiple tools and on multiple platforms, and the word “XML” indicates accurately that DIS 29500 is an XML-based document format. We acknowledge that there may have been some confusion early-on in the process, but, more importantly, that the industry and user community is now largely using “OpenDocument”, “ODF”, “OOXML” or “Open XML” to refer, without confusion, to specific formats. For these reasons, we believe the name “Ecma Office Open XML File Formats” (or “IS 29500:2008 Information technology — Office Open XML File Formats v1.0″ if the standard was to be approved) is appropriate and should not be changed. A growing number of implementations of ECMA-376 are becoming available, including those released by Apple (Mac OS X Leopard, iWork 08, iPhone), Adobe (InDesign), Microsoft (Office 2007, Office 2003, Office XP, Office 2000, Office 2008 Mac OS X), Novell (Suse Open Office) , Google (Search / Preview), Mindjet (MindManager), Intergen, OpenXML/ODF Translator (Open Source project on Sourceforge), Dataviz (DocumentsToGo on Palm OS, MacLinkPlus on Mac OS X Leopard), NeoOffice, Altova (XMLSpy), MarkLogic (XML Content Server), Datawatch (Monarch Pro), QuickOffice (QuickOffice Premier 5.0 on Symbian), Altsoft (XML2PDF Server 2007) and those under development by Corel (WordPerfect), AbiWord, Gnome (GNumeric), Xandros, Linspire, Turbolinux and others. These implementations are now available on many platforms, including Linux, the Macintosh, Windows, and handheld devices (PalmOS, Symbian, Windows Mobile). Note that our response to comments DK-0055 and FR-0034 is to agree to change occurrences of “Open XML” to “Office Open XML”. Similar Comments: AU-0004 , CA-0003 , CL-0216 , GB-0001 , IN-0069 , IR-0055 , US-0167 , US-0270 , ZA-0002