08.24.07
Steve Ballmer Makes Phonecalls to Flip Those Votes in Favour of Monopoly (Updated: China Says “NO”)
Remember recent reports about Bill Gates making secret phonecalls? Well, this sort of corruption has not ended.
The government decided to vote together, and to follow NIST (Homeland Security had voted in favor of approval in the previous ballot), so DoD fell in line as well. NIST, you may recall, is an agency of the Department of Commerce (as I reported Steve Ballmer personally called the Secretary of the DOC to urge this result). GS1is a technical association.
I was not going to bring it up here, but anger can be mitigated through humour. A couple of days ago, someone whom I know created this picture [PNG] to show how Microsoft controls Linux vendors by proxy. Here we have a case where Microsoft controls not only entire nations, but also government departments therein. Disgusting.
Update: On the other side of the ocean, despite controversial lobbying, OOXML has just been rejected by the world’s largest population. China says “No” (with comments).
It’s also interesting in that a large degree of public participation figured into the decision. For example, there is this on-line poll site, which allows anyone to log on to indicate how they thought China should vote on OOXML. As of this moment, the voting was running 92.31% (8294 out of 8985 votes cast) against approval.
China and India, being the huge players that they are, will certainly be a barrier to acceptance of a proprietary ‘monopoly enabler’.
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. 
LinuxTavern said,
August 25, 2007 at 12:18 pm
It’s kind of scary the power that Ballmer and Microsoft have. I don’t think I like the idea that a Microsoft executive can place a call to a high level government official and make something like this happen.
Maybe Microsoft IS the government.