Berlin, 8 May 2026 – Twenty years ago this week, on 3 May 2006, the Open Document Format cleared its Draft International Standard ballot at ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 34 with unanimous approval. On 30 November 2006 it was published as ISO/IEC 26300. Two decades later, ODF remains what it was on the day of its ratification: the only open, vendor-neutral, freely implementable international standard for office documents in existence. Everything else on the market is a vendor format with a standards number attached. That distinction was contested in 2006. It is not contestable in 2026. The competing format pushed through ISO in 2008 – under a fast-track process whose abuses are now part of the documentary record of standards governance – has since splintered into a Strict variant almost no implementation actually uses and a Transitional variant that preserves, by design, the undocumented behaviours of a single vendor’s legacy products. A standard that exists to encode one company’s bugs is not a standard. It is a moat with a certificate. ODF has no Transitional mode. It has no undocumented behaviours. It has no vendor whose commercial roadmap can quietly rewrite what conformance means. The specification is publicly available at no