TextMaker has made a free OpenDocument viewer (free as in "free beer"). It reads OpenDocument text files, as well as other word processing formats (RTF, .doc, .sxw, etc). Currently it's Windows only. I ran it under wine, and it worked alright on simple documents, but it choked on large documents.

TextMaker Office (on which the viewer is based) is cross-platform; it runs on Linux and Windows. So I have high hopes that they'll make a Linux version later.

This is a very neat development. It removes one reason for not using ODF in government. If there is a free, light-weight viewer, then a government agency can put ODF files on its website and link to the viewer just as they do with PDF files.

The fact that the viewer is Windows-only is not catastrophic. Fact is that most Linux users have an office suite that can read OpenDocument files (either OpenOffice.org or KOffice) so there's less benefit in a viewer anyways.

Over all, I think this is great and that this project is worth promotting.

Cheers,
Daniel.