(This is a reconstructed article, which was lost due to a catastrophic server failure)

The OpenDocument Foundation have closed shop.

When I asked Sam Hiser, one of the members, if they were going to wind the foundation down, his reply to me yesterday was “yes, its original purpose was to help develop ODF and we are directing our atttentions to CDF and other areas in part because ODF development is moving into better governance and into smarter hands (IBM);”

Now, their web site is no more.

I’m pretty sure they will return though, to market their “DaVinci” software. There appears to be a domain name called “da-vinci.us”, which was registered on October 717th, 2007, so I fully expect they are reforming themselves to market their product.

Update 1 : Nice article by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols entitled “Open Document Foundation closes up shop”, which fleshes out more details. Highly recommended reading.