09.11.08
More Wins for ODF, Another Potential Loss for ISO’s Reputation
The European Commission will report about its findings and possibly fine Microsoft when that investigation is complete. ISO’s reputation will suffer another blow.
In the mean time, seeing the acceptance of ODF is encouraging and those who adopt ODF are doing a commendable thing. According to the OSI’s Web site, a new addition comes from Yale Law School, demonstrating ODF adoption among academics and scholars where it’s very important (more so than in the industry).
Open Document Formats have finally become the default document format for presentations. Having been at all three editions, I am personally impressed that the ISP has come this far. In the first edition, we had proprietary document formats; during the second edition, there was a 50-50 thing going on but the default still remained proprietary. The third edition has proved to be 100% ODF.
The following new press release commends ODF as well.
Also integrated into the MarkMail archives are group messages from OpenOffice.org, a community in excess of 1 million volunteer and sponsored contributors who develop, translate, support and promote the leading open-source office productivity suite. Its file format, the OpenDocument Format, an ISO standard, has fundamentally revolutionized the ecology of electronic documents and is now being used or considered for use by dozens of national and regional governments and enterprises around the world.
India’s potential plan to bypass ISO recommendations was noted in recent days [1, 2] and ANSI seems to have opened up for feedback. This could invite and even spur some complaints about ISO, whose name was shattered by Microsoft’s OOXML. From ANSI’s Web site:
There are just two weeks left before the submissions deadline for the American National Standards Institute (ANSI)’s Standards That Make a Difference poll. A great opportunity to raise awareness of the standards that have the biggest impact on today’s ever-changing global marketplace, the survey allows organizations and interested stakeholders to highlight the specifications that they value the most.
It’s not only India and ANSI that are open to public feedback at the moment. A constructive discussion is taking place in Jomar’s blog (Brazil). There’s intention to obviate reliance on ISO.
So, these are the first ideas that I would like to share with you, and I would really appreciate it if you would send me your thoughts by posting comments. I sincerely believe that with a small contribution by each of us, we’ll be able to design a new process for standards development that will allow anyone to participate without needing to be a representative of Company Y, or to have a certain degree, and so on. At the end of the day, standards developers or not, we’re all standards users.
Curiously enough, also worth noting is this blog post about Microsoft technology and ODF.
So an interesting challenging was brought up. Why not have an ODF Viewer in microsoft technology. This means VB and ActiveX. This will be as tactical as having a ODF plugin for Microsoft office.
[…]
I guess the language doesn’t matter and some might even think that this is doable using python with win32 or even in Visual C++ or C#. However the challenge is on.
This seems like a bad idea for so many reasons. █
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.