07.11.07
Linspire Continues Bragging About OOXML Support
Shortly after announcing its acceptance of an ‘ODF killer’, Linspire expresses some excitement using another press release.
Linspire, Inc., developer of the Linspire commercial and Freespire community desktop Linux operating systems, today announced the immediate availability of the Open XML Translator within their latest released Freespire and Linspire products.
Lindows follows the footsteps of Windows. Is this the future of Linspire? Surely enough they give their customers an excuse to ignore the international standard. But why? Because Microsoft paid them to do so? They took the money and they must now support an abusive, manipulative monopoly. It is sad.
The following new article explains just why these formats must not be accepted.
Vendor Lock-In
Proprietary formats, such as DOC and MP3, are dangerously common. While almost everyone on the planet uses these formats to save and share their data, the formats themselves are not in the public domain, but belong to corporations (in these cases, Microsoft and Thomson Consumer Electronics (et al.), respectively. Admittedly, this doesn’t usually pose much of a problem in the short term. Songs you ripped to MP3 ten years ago still play just fine on your current player, and you can still open Word docs you created in the early ’90s. The trouble comes when you – or the company that owns the format – decides it’s time for a change.Case in point: This year, Microsoft has decided to introduce a new format, Open XML (aka DOCX) which it has declared the new standard for Word files. Immediately, a schism broke open. While almost everyone on earth is still using the older DOC format, many who upgrade to Office 2007 unwittingly began using the new format (set as the default for Word 2007), which is unreadable to their colleagues without the use of a conversion utility. Time spent fiddling around converting file formats means lost productivity and lost revenues for businesses, governments, and end users who didn’t think there was anything particularly wrong with the old format.
If there a more resources on these matters, please share them. Let’s build a Web of information. This site serves over 3,000 pages per day (excluding search engines and bots), so surely we can make a difference together, essentially by informing as many people as we can.
Richard Stallman’s new talk at CERN might be of interest to some.
Highlight: Novell was the first to acknowledge that Microsoft FUD tactics had substance. Novell then used anti-Linux FUD to market itself. 
Highlight: Xandros let Microsoft make patent claims and brag about (paid-for) OOXML support. 
Highlight: Linspire's CEO not only fell into Microsoft arms, but he also assisted the company's attack on GNU/Linux. 
Highlight: Microsoft craves pseudo (proprietary) standards and gets its way using proxies and influence which it buys. 
Highlight: The invasion into the open source world is intended to leave Linux companies neglected, due to financial incentives from Microsoft. 
Analysis: Xen, an open source hypervisor, possibly fell victim to Microsoft's aggressive (and stealthy) acquisition-by-proxy strategy.
Zaine Ridling said,
July 11, 2007 at 2:36 pm
Wonder whta they’ll do with all the formula errors in MS-OOXML, then? Didn’t any of the “experts” at Ecma even bother checking? See Rob Wier for more on this development:
http://www.robweir.com/blog/2007/07/formula-for-failure.html
Zaine Ridling said,
July 11, 2007 at 2:38 pm
Oops, just read down — you’ve already covered that base. Ha! Sorry for the frivolous comment.
Stephen said,
July 11, 2007 at 5:33 pm
Ummm, hasn’t OpenOffice been able to read .DOC for like EVER? What’s the beef?
Roy Schestowitz said,
July 11, 2007 at 6:43 pm
Zaine, it was frivolous at all. It’s a very important example (among many) that shows the dangers of OOXML. I am actually subscribed the Rob’s blog and I was the first one to comment on his findings.