05.02.08
Posted in Microsoft, GNU/Linux, FUD, OpenDocument, Europe, Courtroom, Antitrust, Open XML, FOSS, Africa, ISO at 10:36 am by Roy Schestowitz
Reactions to the lawsuit against the secretive BSI are starting to surface.
That the BSI, long the quintessence of standards in this country, should see itself dragged through the courts over something as apparently minor as a document standard, is truly an extraordinary development. But of course it is not a minor issue: at stake is the question of how something as central to technology and business as standards should be decided. Unless people have complete confidence in the process, the end-result will be deemed worthless – truly, little more than a “rubber-stamping”.
A good start along the road of bolstering confidence would be making the standards-setting process completely open, which currently it is not. The practice of voting on an open standard behind closed doors borders is simply not justifiable in the age of the Internet and of increasing openness in general. And as the UK government loves to remind us: if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear….
For Microsoft’s abuses against openness there may already be a series of trials (more information here and here where you can get the latest).
It’s just the beginning and it’s more important than most people realise. The EC won’t be impressed by the situation in South Africa, either. Glyn Moody utters the following words about the latest development:
And which bunch of geniuses put this nonesense together? Why, our old friends CompTIA, which has by now given up any pretense of offering objective comment on the computer market, and is simply a vehicle for crude Microsoft propaganda.
The propaganda in South Africa isn’t just being orchestrated by those “you are well paid, shut up” hires from CompTIA. It’s not exclusive. Here is another new article from South Africa. Words like “genuine”, “protect”, “pirates” and “piracy” are used, despite the fact that Microsoft admitted that it needs people to ’steal’ its software [1, 2].
The daemonising headline says it all. This almost makes you believe that Microsoft was attacked by an unfriendly nation from the southern seas using large boats, swords, canons and maybe and modern-age aircraft carriers.
Microsoft tackles South African pirates
[…]
“The crackdowns are part of Microsoft’s global Genuine Software Initiative, which aims to help protect legitimate distributors and customers from the effects of software piracy,” said Mark Reynolds, Microsoft South Africa partner executive.
Pirates? Pirates! Maybe if they say it often enough, then people will sympathise with the very same company whose founder speaks of getting people “sort of addicted”.
Is Microsoft trying even harder to push South Africa towards GNU/Linux and ODF? Bad timing. Moreover, by its own admission, Microsoft benefits from sharing of its software without a licence. Who is the company kidding?
Speaking of software licenses and their imaginary value, only a couple of days since we last discussed it Microsoft appears to be escaping some taxation again (the typical location being Ireland, as seen before).
The main Irish subsidiary of software giant Microsoft slashed the dividend paid to its US parent to €1.48bn last year despite turnover at the Dublin-based European headquarters climbing 12.5pc to €10.65bn.
The dividend payment is roughly half the almost €3bn the Irish subsidiary remitted to the US headquarters in the financial year ended June 2006.
Who is the “pirate” now? █
“Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrr… ogance”
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Posted in Law, Microsoft, UNIX, OpenDocument, Europe, Courtroom, Antitrust, Open XML, Africa at 12:39 am by Roy Schestowitz
The anticipated legal action against ISO has just begun, starting with the BSI. If you have been following this Web site for a while, then you probably know that there is plenty of concrete evidence of corruption around the world. Microsoft loves to vainly deny this, joined by ISO and business partners that send away semi-edited letter templates (it’s not a crime to deny and lie about wrongdoing unless you do this under a sworn court testimony).
Mind you, Microsoft’s long history, which filled to the rim with antitrust stories, has many times revealed that Microsoft systematically lied even to the courts at times, not just to the press. But anyway, today’s story is about the BSI, which is not Microsoft but on the face of things is heavily influenced by it. Articles about the legal action include the following pair:
1. UK standards body taken to court over OOXML
The British Standards Institution has been taken to court by a group of Unix users in an attempt to get the standards body to recant its approval of Microsoft’s Office Open XML document format.
The UK Unix & Open Systems User Group (UKUUG) said on Thursday that the British Standards Institution’s (BSI’s) controversial decision to vote for approval of OOXML in a recent International Organization for Standardization (ISO) ballot followed a flawed decision-making process.
2. BSI faces High Court challenge over OOXML U-turn
OSC director Mark Taylor told The Register that the UKUUG and chums were “very confident that the BSI has a case to answer”. He claimed that “they haven’t followed procedures and we want them to explain their controversial actions”.
However, even if legal action against the BSI leads to the UK standards body being forced, in the form of mandatory orders, to withdraw its vote to the ISO, its impact could be muted.
Taylor agreed: “Should the BSI be asked to remove its vote, that in itself probably won’t change the outcome.”
He added that the group hopes to see individuals in other countries mount similar challenges against national standards bodies in order to force the ISO to “sit up and take notice”.
If ISO (and Microsoft) believes that it has a headache now, it doesn’t yet know what’s in store. To echo the words of Neelie Kroes:
“If you flee the rules, you will be caught. And it will cost you dearly.”
–Neelie Kroes (announcing the latest Microsoft fine)
Europe is not the only region to have gotten angry and ignored Microsoft’s OOXML by the way. This good article about South Africa [via Simon Phipps] says a little more about the nation’s disregard for what has been more of a political and technical fiasco than the patent-encumbered format proposal which it is. The next few months promise to be interesting because with Microsoft lobbyists gently threatening governments it’s clear that the monopoly will play dirty to shelter its cash cows. █
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04.30.08
Posted in Microsoft, FUD, Standard, OpenDocument, Open XML, Ecma, OpenOffice, Africa at 10:15 pm by Roy Schestowitz
Hubris-infected anti-ODF brigadiers
The other day we mentioned South Africa because of its decision to embrace OpenDocument format. Shortly afterwards we spotted Microsoft’s plan to pay a little visit to this country. Coincidence? Maybe.
Look what comes from Rob Weir at the moment — or rather — what comes from Microsoft lobbyists at this moment, specifically in South Africa. Andy Updegrove spotted this rather bizarre press release from the home of Mr. “you are well paid, shut up”.
Another neo-colonialist press release from Microsoft’s CompTIA lobbying arm, this time inveighing against South Africa’s adoption of ODF as a national standard. One way to point out the absurdity of their logic is to replace the reference to ODF with references to any other useful standard that a government might adopt, like electrical standards.
Microsoft can never let things just rest, can it? Will someone be bullied again? We have already seen CompTIA and Microsoft doing their tag-team act in Malaysia, which is moving to ODF and OpenOffice.org. To be fair, even former Microsoft evangelist, Robert Scoble, is now dumping Microsoft Office, amid times of sinking sales for Microsoft’s cash cows.
My Microsoft Office trial is over. I am not spending $450 just to get Outlook. Gmail and Google Calendar win this game: big time.
South Africa is not just being approached by Microsoft’s lobbying arm. Sun has just offered South Africa StarOffice for virtually free (it’s already free in Google Pack).
As government begins its move to the Open Document Format (ODF) standard, Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz has offered President Thabo Mbeki as many copies of StarOffice his office requires for a total cost of just $1.00.
[…]
Beveridge explains that the biggest implemetation project currently underway within the South African government is the move to ODF.
At the end of the day, it all boils down to choice — the choice between applications and vendors based on price and value. It’s not about choice of standards (which are about universality, not diversity of standards that basically beat their own purpose). The world already has a standard and it’s called ODF. Perception and marketing play a role here and the false belief that Microsoft Office is indispensable is only further perpetuated by blind (or blinded) journalists like our ‘old friend’ Rich Tehranim who sill writes for TMCNet. Consider this old story a nice analogy.
In the May edition of CTI (Computer-Telephone Integration) magazine, publisher Rich Tehrani paints a slick, simplistic view of the CTI industry. He claims that CTI is moving from a proprietary set of vendor-oriented platforms, to an “open” PC-based architecture. He praises this supposed openness, saying, “There’s open, and then there’s OPEN!” However, Mr. Tehrani is hiding the truth. That depends on what meaning of the word open is.
[…]
With devious publishers like Rich Tehrani dominating the CTI magazine publishing space, forcing out writers that support real openness and real freedom of choice, most buyers of CTI technology have no idea that they are being maneuvered and hoodwinked into supporting a closed, choiceless world. It’s coconspirators like Rich Tehrani and his TMC (Technology Media Publishing) that make Microsoft’s greed and power lust work effectively to kill consumer and business choice.
How little things have changed. █
“There will always be ignorance, and ignorance leads to fear. But with time, people will come to accept their silicon masters.”
–Bill Gates
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04.24.08
Posted in Microsoft, Bill Gates, Patents, Standard, OpenDocument, Open XML, FOSS, Africa at 6:46 am by Roy Schestowitz
A reader has just sent us a little valuable headsup about the recently-reported news of South Africa adopting ODF. His message is in italics below:
I am concerned about the recent wise movement by the South African government favouring truly open standards (ODF) and against software patents being sabotaged by Microsoft Corporation:
1 South Africa choses ODF/ISO26300 (and NOT MSOOXML) as National standards:
http://www.tectonic.co.za/?p=2365
http://www.oss.gov.za/MIOS_V4.1_final.pdf [PDF] (page 19)
By the way, this happens little after the MSOOXML at ISO fiasco battle and after the South African minister of Public Service and Administration slammed software patents and Microsoft for not adopting ODF:
http://www.tectonic.co.za/?p=2304
2 Jason Matusow (Microsoft’s Director of Corporate Standards) [whom we have many reasons not to trust, e.g. [1, 2]] flies to South Africa to do “external outreach”
(maybe “covert-ops” at policy level rather than just “outreach” are in the making? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covert_ops )
….is a reversal of the policy favouring ODF on the horizon? Microsoft no doubt sooner or later will attempt it, as we have witnessed in many other countries before. Let’s keep an eye on this to see if we are wrong or not…
Quick recap for background:
There are many more examples and interesting past incidents from South Africa too, due to some strong pro-FOSS sentiments over there. Microsoft was seen making visits to that country when there was a ‘crisis’ (in the Microsoft sense of the word). Remember Bill Gates’ recent visit to Paris when the police dealt a blow to Microsoft and moved to GNU/Linux? He got some children “addicted”, as he himself calls it. That’s just the way it works, but it’s typically hush-hush. Let’s keep an eye open. █
Update: someone sort of suggested a couple of days ago that Microsoft’s lobbying arms might step us to do the ‘dirty work’ in South Africa
If Microsoft thinks it can now inject its immature OOXML as an alternative format in South Africa’s MIOS, they certainly are facing an uphill battle. SABS and DST will undoubtedly expect to hear a lot of whinging about “choice” and “market forces” lobbied at certain Ministerial Departments. Will CompTIA and ISC please step up?
This goes to show that certain Ministries of Science and Technology can stand up for the interests of their citizens, and not have to feel pressured by a single foreign multinational. If only this independence was more prevalent around the world.
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04.21.08
Posted in Microsoft, OpenDocument, Open XML, FOSS, Africa, Fraud, ISO at 7:11 pm by Roy Schestowitz
“Microsoft boss Bill Gates threatened to kill 800 Danish jobs if Denmark opposed the European Computer Implemented Inventions Directive, reports today’s Danish financial daily Børsen, quoted by NoSoftwarePatents.com”
–P2PNet, 2005
Yesterday we wrote about ugly denials by Microsoft and even ISO — denials that shortly afterwards turned out to be bald-faced lies. It new reports are correct, this appears to have also been the case elsewhere, further away from the sight of the western world.
Have a look what’s being reported in Kenya. Microsoft of course tries to deny everything, but having been caught it lying in the past, Microsoft’s denial is worthless.
However, the denial [by Microsoft] was a contradiction to comments by Bitange Ndemo, permanent secretary in the Ministry of Information and Communication, who said that Microsoft may have made comments regarding funding, though not directly or in writing.
“They may have said something to that effect though not directly and not in writing. Microsoft cannot threaten us. In any case, our policy is very clear, we encourage people to use open-source software and those who want to use proprietary software are at liberty to do so” Ndemo said.
There was heated debate in Kenya’s technology sector before the decision to abstain. The decision was made by a 12-member committee. Some experts felt that the committee was comprised of a majority of Microsoft partners.
It seems like Microsoft is just doing some damage control at the moment by having its lies stick in the press. We saw this before, not just in Norway.
For those who might be studying these incidents, we previously mentioned OOXML stories from Kenya in:
In this dirty dance of money and power, many incidents remain unresolved and questions remain unanswered. Having written about a trip to Seattle and other interesting possibilities, we have also just found this image (positioned at the top) where Patrick Durusau joins Microsoft managers for a photograph where they all seem to be getting along. Coming from the systematic liars (proven and documents) whom he joins, it’s hard to have much trust anymore.
Someone with a high level of authority is hopefully investigating what was probably the biggest Microsoft scandal of this decade. Tolerating this is permitting abuse of amny systems and abuse of the innocent customers, many of whom haven’t an idea. █
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Posted in Microsoft, Standard, OpenDocument, Europe, Open XML, OpenOffice, Africa, ISO at 3:56 pm by Roy Schestowitz
We recently saw this in Brazil and now it’s another country from the southern hemisphere. Tectonic breaks the news about South Africa adopting ODF as a national standard.
The South African Bureau of Standards (SABS) on Friday approved the Open Document Format (ODF) as an official national South African standard. The adoption of ODF by South Africa opens the way for the businesses and government to adopt ODF more widely in their processes.
This is all very encouraging and also expected, unless some France-style corruptions were to take place. We recently saw a South African minister, Fraser-Moleketi, urging against OOXML and the software patents it’s associated with.
In other ODF news, there’s not much of the same level of impact, but the OpenOffice.org team has begun boasting some new icons.
In Windows or KDE (Linux), drag OpenOffice.org from the start menu to the desktop. In GNOME, right click the OpenOffice.org menu entry and then choose Add this launcher to desktop.
Support ODF, which is likely to be the only ISO standard when the storm is over. If not, the clouds hanging over OOXML’s head will make it controversial enough to be worth avoiding. Just watch what is already happening in Europe, which has clearly seen enough. █
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04.19.08
Posted in SCO, Novell, Courtroom, Virtualization, Africa, Mail at 8:54 am by Roy Schestowitz
This is where a leftover of news should fit rather well. All articles allude to Novell in one form or another. The first item speaks of hypervisors and has Novell mentioned because of its ownership of PlateSpin — the result of of a rather pricey and recent acquisition.
One company that was looking to make this a problem of the past was PlateSpin, now swallowed by Novell. PlateSpin provides virtual image management, and was bringing to market the capability to carry out on-the-fly virtual-to-virtual (V2V) conversions from one format to another. This not only makes it easier to provision the function, service or application that is required at any one moment, but also eases image management itself. For example, an application image will need patching or upgrading at intervals. Having just one image that can be provisioned to multiple virtualised environments will be far more manageable than having to patch multiple images, one for each environment.
At the moment, the jury is still out as to how Novell plans to play the PlateSpin card it now has in its hand. The majority of other players have a vested interest in keeping virtualisation proprietary, and Quocirca does not expect to see those who stand to gain a lot of their revenues through the sale of their own hypervisor, or who believe that they can take the big guys on directly, putting in great efforts to ensure full interoperability with other vendors’ systems.
More news about Novell in this context you will find in the following article/blog post.
Novell actually conducted a survey among 411 data center managers last year in conjunction with Lighthouse Research that found approximately 61 percent of companies either use a manual process or no process at all to track server resources. What’s more, almost 80 percent still use manual means to reallocate server workloads.
The Novell-sponsored survey found that 67 percent of data center managers are evaluating management technologies in order to save space in their data centers, while 65 percent were considered power savings. More often than not, you won’t be surprised to hear, virtualization was the mechanism by which they hoped to achieve this. Slightly less than half of the respondents already use virtualization, while more than half of the remaining respondents are evaluating server virtualization for the future.
Here is Novell calling for its channel to specialise a little. This comes from the newly-appointed Michelle Beetar, who took over the operations after a mass exodus of staff.
Novell has realigned itself from being a “pretty direct” company, to a “channel-centric” one. So says Novell SA country manager Michelle Beetar.
Here is a duel involving Domino, GroupWise and Exchange.
Novell still sells GroupWise as well, but along with the rest of the products in the company, Novell is focusing it more now to run on the Linux platform rather than NetWare. (That said, GroupWise will still run on NetWare as well as Linux and Windows.)
Groklaw still keeps an eye on the Novell-SCO court battle, which is handy for those who are patient enough to dig into documents and are sufficiently familiar with the background of this long-standing case.
Here’s Novell’s Opposition to SCO’s Motion for Judgment on the Pleadings on Novell’s Claims for Money or Claim for Declaratory Relief [PDF] as text.
Looking at the week ahead, the local press reveals that Novell will host a meeting.
The Utah Valley Entrepreneurs’ Forum, Omniture, the Open Source Technology Center at Novell, the Provo Business Development Corp., Utah Science, Technology, and Research; and the Utah Fund of Funds will host a free lecture series featuring speaker Josh Coates, who will discuss “Marketing: Press, Analysts and the Interweb.”
Novell seems almost like the centre of attention in this region. █
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04.07.08
Posted in Formats, Microsoft, Deception, Office Suites, Bill Gates, Patents, Standard, OpenDocument, Antitrust, Open XML, FOSS, Africa, ISO at 4:55 am by Roy Schestowitz
OOXML is trouble to the IT industry and everyone knows it, even those who are close to Microsoft and therefore seek to capitalise on the anti-competitive nature of OOXML.
We already know about the lying, the cheating, the bullying and the bribes which this OOXML fiasco has involved. We have it all documented. This makes standards less important as a whole, but there are some implications that tend to escape people’s attention and we present some of them here, particularly in light of the news. Be warned that this very partial, but hopefully informative as far as the topics covered are concerned.
Preservation
We wrote quite a lot in the past about document formats and their relationship with digital preservation (or curation). The nature of lock-in is typically adverse to the notion of future access. You will find material of interest in:
Here comes a very timely April 2008 special from IEEE Spectrum. The referenced page speaks of death of digital media, which is related to the loss of digital access due to antiquated, unmaintained or poorly documented formats, such as OOXML.
A storage device can become obsolete in less than two years, as this timeline shows
Death of Digital Media: Jaz! Clik! Sparq! In no time, some of these storage devices leaped into oblivion. The media may survive, but will anyone be able to read them?
It’s a slideshow by the way. Worth watching. The new Abiword 2.6 already supports ODF, mind you, which Microsoft Office cannot (not properly anyway). What is Microsoft waiting for? OOXML is truly incapable of preservation information because nobody will ever implement it , not even Microsoft itself.
Software Patents
Another important issue developers mustn’t lose sight of is software patents. OOXML has heaps of them and this makes fertile ground for patents ambush, as stressed by the article “Buy, Cheat, Steal, and Lie: The OOXML Story”.
A 2007 decision from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit may end up coming back to haunt Microsoft in their ongoing U.S. antitrust battle. The case revolved around claims by Broadcom that Qualcomm had deliberately included its patents in the Universal Mobile Telecommunications System standard in order to create a monopoly for its products. The appeals court held that if a company acts deceptively to gain adoption of a standard that then results in a monopoly to their advantage, they can be held to have violated anti-trust laws, irrespective of their right to determine the use of their patents. Interestingly enough, the Court of Appeals ruling relies on a Federal Trade Commission ruling which in turn relied on — drumroll, please — United States v. Microsoft, the very case that put MS under supervision in the first place.
All we can say is, we hope that with this many available avenues, something is done to rectify the farce acted out over the last several months.
Microsoft was last caught lying about this anti-GPL OSP only over a week ago, just in time for the key decision. More examples of patent ambush (OOXML included) you can find in:
Web ‘Infection’
Bill Gates once spoke about adding proprietary Office extensions to the Web browser and the World Wide Web. Here is just one of the E-mails that show this. [PDF].
From: Bill Gates
Sent: Saturday, December 05, 1998 9:44 AM
To: Bob Muglia (Exchange); Jon DeVaan; Steven Sinofsky
Cc: Paul Mariz
Subject: Office rendering
One thing we have got to change is our strategy — allowing Office documents to be rendered very well by OTHER PEOPLES BROWSERS is one of the most destructive things we could do to the company.
We have to stop putting any effort into this and make sure that Office documents very well depends on PROPRIETARY IE capabilities.
Anything else is suicide for our platform. This is a case where Office has to to destroy Windows.
We showed several more examples here, all based on Microsoft’s own words, which were extracted from antitrust exhibits.
Now they can possibly add what Rob Weir called “Open HTML” the other day to their Web browser. They might call it an ‘open’ (ISO-approved) standard instead of a “proprietary extensions”. Since it is just a proprietary format with Windows dependencies and GPL incompatibilities in place, Microsoft can try to break the Web further while using the ISO that it bought as a shield against complaints.
Shall you complain about ‘Open HTML’-based sites (maybe even government-tied), Microsoft would point at ISO’s directions and so would the government, which was seen selling out for proprietary XAML before. That’s just what makes it so outrageous and dangerous.
Competition
OOXML harms real competition. It puts Microsoft at the centre of the document universe and has everyone else enslaved to it.
We recently included a video of Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi, who spoke about standards and competition. She realised that OOXML, much like software patents, is seriously anti-competitive. She urged against both.
We mentioned around the same time also a bad follow-up article where Microsoft, in response, threw some mud — so to speak — declaring or at least by implication characterising advocates of Free software as “anti-industry”, “anti-capitalism” and “anti-Microsoft”.
Professor Derek Keats, whom we mentioned many times before [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9], has published a letter to explain why this rebuttal was utterly deceiving, to say the very least.
Shuttleworth is of course part of the IT industry. His company, Canonical, is a business based on FOSS. Canonical’s revenue comes from implementing FOSS business models. There are many other companies, including fairly substantial multinationals, that use FOSS and hybrid FOSS/proprietary business models to gain revenue. Among them are Sun Microsystems, IBM, Novell, Red Hat and others.
[…]
The minister talked about the need for open standards. Who would implement such standards but the IT industry? The article presents the impression that the minister’s call for open standards is somehow against that very industry. The article clearly sets up the notion of FOSS and open standards as being anti-Microsoft, which is equally absurd. If the particular standard that is at the heart of current debate is accepted, Microsoft will obviously be one of its implementers because to do otherwise would be suicide.
It is a shame to see that Microsoft’s brainwash in the media even required such an obvious clarification. When will the company stop daemonising Free software? █
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« Previous entries ·
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.