08.25.08
Posted in Standard, OpenDocument, Open XML, IBM, ISO at 6:01 pm by Roy Schestowitz
“The disparity of rules for PAS, Fast-Track and ISO committee generated standards is fast making ISO a laughing stock in IT circles.”
–Martin Bryan, Former Convenor of OOXML WG1
It might seem as though Microsoft could ruin soon OASIS just as it ruined ISO with ECMA. Even the IEEE and a certain situation irked some observers after it had gotten closer to ISO. OASIS, being one that thrives in openness and transparency, needs none of Microsoft, yet according to this, Microsoft might want to treat it like it already (mis)treats ODF. It gives away money. Has the world forgotten how viciously Microsoft attacked ODF [1, 2] and at a later stage slammed OASIS as well, especially through its ‘talking heads’?
Regarding this latest development, Pamela Jones at Groklaw wrote: “I gather OASIS has no sense of irony. It’s a Security Challenges for the Information Society conference, September 30 through October 3 in New London: “The Forum will provide a unique opportunity for the security standards community (public sector, private sector and standards developing organizations) to come together to discuss current issues and challenges, strategic approaches, recent successes, and future outlooks.” Microsoft is a Gold sponsor, and DTrace is Platinum, which is a higher category, but the OASIS newsletter titles the item, “Microsoft sponsors upcoming OASIS Security Forum near London”. And so it begins, I fear.”
Does Microsoft suddenly think that OASIS is not all that bad? Is this just presence? Does it want to make it worse, so as to make it “equally ruined” w.r.t. ISO? Speaking of ‘talking heads, Patrick Durusau can’t help unleashing some outrageous letters. A new rebuttal:
Unlike editors as Durusau Microsoft standardisation participants are loyal drones of their company’s standard they edit. SC34 won’t be able to do anything which is not approved or developed in the United States. External input would be ignored unless there is a leverage. We saw it during the process. “Vendor capture” as we call it. The whole situation makes a joke out of international standardisation institutions. ISO should be as concerned as industry veterans are.
So why surrender to perpetrators because Durusau finds it more cozy? I have to admit, that is the wrong question. The true evil ISO perpetrator is IBM, a company behind everything…
ODF is not IBM. Far from it. So, what are these letters about anyway [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]? █
“That particular meeting was followed by an anonymous smear campaign against one of the TC members. A letter was faxed to the organization of the TC member in question, accusing the TC member in question of helping politicize the issue (which is, of course, untrue). I too had the dubious pleasure of hearing first hand how Microsoft attempted to remove me from the TC (they did not succeed, thanks to integrity and cojones of the organization I am affiliated with).”
“If this unethical behaviour by Microsoft was not sufficiently despicable, they did the unthinkable by involving politics in what should have been a technical evaluation of the standard by writing to the head of the Malaysian standards organization and getting its business partners to engage in a negative letter writing campaign to indicate lack of support of ODF in the Malaysian market. Every single negative letter on ODF received by the Malaysian standards organization was written either by Microsoft, or a Microsoft business partner or a Microsoft affiliated organization (Initiative for Software Choice and IASA).“
A Memo to Patrick Durusau
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08.22.08
Posted in Microsoft, Novell, Mono, Patents, Ubuntu, IBM at 8:18 pm by Roy Schestowitz
IBM’s Bob Sutor does not like Mono. This was covered before [1, 2, 3]. Despite the fact that he rejects Mono, IBM’s stance is a tad different. IBM, for reasons that we mentioned before, still accepts Novell and accepts what it did with Microsoft. In fact, Linden Labs now embraces some of Novell’s Mono.
Linden Labs is installing the Mono Project’s virtual machine on its heavily trafficked Second Life servers - Sadville runs more than 2,500 clustered servers.
I’ve inquired here and received some responses. One comes from Chris Ward, who belongs to IBM. What to make of it all? It’s uncertain.
Yesterday we mentioned a Mono ‘guard’ in Ubuntu Forums. There was a long discussion about it in the IRC channel today (logs will go live tomorrow). It seems very mysterious and it also may be possible that Novell employees are promoting and protecting Mono under anonymous account in Ubuntu Forums. Maybe they are just part of the Mono developers community. We have no proof yet, but either way, it looks rather bad.
There’s reason to be cautious but not yet concerned. Watch what someone says in this brand-new review of gOS 3.
Now even though Adobe AIR and Mono version of Microsoft Silverlight is still in Beta stage and are very buggy, still gOS team might consider including them in future release…
Keep the software clean from Mono. The reasons were explained before [1, 2]. █
“At Microsoft I learned the truth about ActiveX and COM and I got very interested in it inmediately [sic].”
–Miguel de Icaza
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08.20.08
Posted in Microsoft, GNU/Linux, SCO, Novell, SUN, Antitrust, Interoperability, IBM at 8:47 am by Roy Schestowitz
“[Bill Gates] is divisive. He is manipulative. He is a user. He has taken much from me and the industry.”
–Gary Kildall
An extensive list of Microsoft offenses is something that we already have, but it does not go very far back. One reader brought this oldie to our attention, adding: “Here’s an item that I considered to be one of the key aspects of the Microsoft-SCO cooperation.”
The Caldera antitrust lawsuit included some of the most damning evidence of Microsoft misconduct; breakware, black propaganda, all was there, the potential embarrassment being such that there was good reason for Microsoft to settle, then try to pretend it never happened. Now, however, maybe it didn’t ever happen - because the evidence is being pulped.
AP reports that the 937 boxes of court-ordered documents, which have been in store since the lawsuit, are currently being destroyed at the behest of SCO, their owner and - surely coincidentally - Microsoft’s new friend. Some 40 boxes have been temporarily hijacked by Sun, which is busily scanning them for use in its own antitrust suit, but after it’s done so they’ll be off for pulping too.
“The rest is a pump-and-dump scheme repurposed for FUD,” he says
The same reader has also warned us that stuff like this keeps popping up in people’s faces: “Microsoft Corp.’s unlikely alliance with Linux software vendor Novell Inc.” This was covered some moments ago, but it’s outweighed by articles from unsuspecting journalists, who continue to just parrot Microsoft and Novell. The Register is a bit of an exception because it says: “Novell doesn’t mind, though. In fact it thinks selling its soul to Steve Ballmer was a tremendous idea.”
Our reader adds: “I suppose the goal is to repeat the myth enough times that people start to believe it. Bill really got his panties in a twist over Novell in 1988 when DR-DOS 5, as well as years before that.
“So, where have these journalists been the last 20 years that they haven’t noticed that Bill Gates has been gunning for Novell since the 1980’s.
“And from 1988 found in Case No. 2:96CV645B, in Caldera’s finding of facts [PDF]:
“You never sent me a response on the question of what
things an app would do that would make it run with MSDOS
and not run DR-DOS. Is there any version check or api
they fail to have? Is ther feature they have that might
get in our way? I am not looking for something they cant
get around. I am looking for something their current
binary fails on.”
Bill Gates, September 22, 1988
There’s a lot more here and here. There’s more about Gary Kildall’s legacy in this page. For background there’s also Wikipedia.
Gary Arlen Kildall (May 19, 1942 – July 11, 1994) was an American computer scientist and microcomputer entrepreneur who created the CP/M operating system and founded Digital Research, Inc. (DRI). Kildall was one of the first people to see microprocessors as fully capable computers rather than equipment controllers and to organize a company around this concept.[1] He also co-hosted the PBS TV show The Computer Chronicles. Although his career in computing spanned more than two decades, he is mainly remembered in connection with IBM’s unsuccessful attempt in 1980 to license CP/M for the IBM PC.
“And then,” says our reader, there’s this.
He continues: “Just for the record, QDOS which became MS-DOS when Bill later bought it, was a clone of CP/M and by version 4 sucked so badly that competitors like DR-DOS hopped over 4 in their own versioning to avoid being associated with MS-DOS 4. The market that Gates wanted was dominated by DR-DOS with graphical shells Desqview and GEM. On technical merits, MS-DOS under Windows 2,3,95,and 98 could not compete.” █
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Posted in Microsoft, Windows, GNU/Linux, Deception, IBM, FOSS at 6:30 am by Roy Schestowitz
“More Open Than Open […] I am constantly amazed at the flexibility of this single word.”
–Microsoft’s Jason Matusow, integral part of the ‘Open’ XML corruptions (further background in [1, 2, 3])
Here we are moving from the “open-source compatible” meme to “(Open) APIs” as “open source”. Microsoft’s attempts to hijack and deform “open source” were mentioned many times before, e.g. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]. It’s endless. The same goes for those verbal tricks in the Philippines — tricking developers into getting locked in with “open source” (the Microsoft way) [1, 2, 3].
IBM is accusing Microsoft of deception in the very same publication that previously deceived. A new article, “Microsoft not really following open-source model,” says:
Microsoft has been wanting to get cozy lately with open source developers but a top IBM executive warns that the world’s largest software maker is not ready to give up full control yet.
Michael O’Rourke, Asia Pacific vice president for IBM Rational, believes that while Microsoft said it would open up APIs (application programming interfaces) of its core products such as Windows and Microsoft Office, the company isn’t really “open sourcing” its software.
[…]
“Microsoft is not exactly telling developers that they own the platform,” he said. Microsoft of late has been touting its conciliatory stance with the open-source community.
Unfortunately, Microsoft relies on those who are naive enough not to realise that Microsoft sponsors (even creates) events like OSBC [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]. What for? In order to replace Free software with a monster called “enterprise/commercial open source”, which it hopes will run only/better under Windows and will pay software patent tax, even where such patents are illegal. █
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08.19.08
Posted in Law, Microsoft, GNU/Linux, OLPC, Hardware, Antitrust, IBM, HP, Dell, xandros at 12:41 pm by Roy Schestowitz
“I once preached peaceful coexistence with Windows. You may laugh at my expense — I deserve it.”
–Be’s CEO Jean-Louis Gassée
G
NU/Linux laptops continue to arrive, but Microsoft is working hard to end this. It ought to be emphasised that ASUS has already said that it is now “tied up” with Microsoft [1, 2, 3]. ASUS is not the only one to have come under such imprisonment a relationship, but it incidentally spoke out about it. It’s the usual pressure tactics, whose goal is to have distribution of Linux curtailed or neglected.
There’s lots more to to speculate about. ASUS picked Xandros, which has some iffy past with Microsoft, never mind under the Corel flag.
More worryingly, have people forgotten that Xandros is a patent ally of Microsoft? In simple terms, despite the claims from the CEO of the company, ASUS is carrying a liability which can then be passed to users in the form of burden/cost that’s brought as incentives to Microsoft. This is extortion. Software patents are void in this case as nothing was ever shown.
OEM pressure tactics were covered quite extensively before, but a reader has sent us a pointer to the following strong message from 1999. We reproduce it below. The anonymous reader added: “Here’s an interesting comment with first hand experience about how hard it is to overcome Microsoft.”
Jean-Louis Gassée on why PC manufacturers don’t sell non MS products
* To: info-policy-notes <info-policy-notes@essential.org>
* Subject: Jean-Louis Gassée on why PC manufacturers don’t sell non MS products
* From: James Love <love@cptech.org>
* Date: Fri, 26 Feb 1999 12:05:55 -0500
* Organization: http://www.cptech.org
* Sender: jamie@essential.org
This important essay by Jean-Louis Gassée is a devastating
critique of the 1995 DOJ/Microsoft consent agreement and
a clear explanation to the barriers facing MS competitors
in the OS market.
Jamie
http://www.be.com/aboutbe/benewsletter/volume_III/Issue8.html#Gassee
Be Newsletter
Volume III, Issue 8, February 24, 1999
Crack in the Wall
By Jean-Louis Gassée
You’re the CEO of a PC OEM, delivering some great news to Wall
Street: “In an effort to offer greater variety and performance
to the customer, our factory now installs three operating systems
on the hard disk — Windows, Linux, and the BeOS. The reaction
has been spectacular. Customers love having a choice of OS, and
the press — from John Dvorak in PC Magazine to John Markoff in
the New York Times to Walt Mossberg in the Wall Street Journal –
has heralded us for our bold move. This is a great step forward for
the consumer and for the industry. Oh, and by the way, we lost
$50 million since we no longer qualify for Windows rebates. But it’s
a sacrifice for the common good.”
You’re now the ex-CEO of a PC OEM.
We know that the Windows rebate scheme exists — but what *is* it,
exactly? And why are so many OEMs afraid of losing it? Windows
pricing practices are closely guarded secrets, so we don’t know
exactly how the rebate is structured, but we can assume that it works
something like this: The total cost of a Windows license consists
of a base price offset by a rebate. The base price is set; the
rebate is flexible, and contingent on the “dedication” of the licensee.
That is, the more you “advertise” the product — through
prominent positioning, expanded shelf space, and so on — the
greater your rebate. This quid pro quo rebate looks innocent enough,
and can be a useful tool in a competitive market.
But when you’re running a monopoly — and when it comes to
out-of-the-box, consumer-grade PC clones, Microsoft *is* a monopoly –
“prominent positioning” and “expanded shelf space” have little meaning.
Microsoft has no interest in getting “more” footage on the OS shelf,
because they’ve already got it all. What interests them — the only
useful advantage they can “buy” (to be kind) with
their rebate — is to ensure that no one else will get any.
So how is “dedication” measured? A real-life example: We’ve been
working with a PC OEM that graciously — and bravely — decided to
load the BeOS on certain configurations in its product line. However,
there’s a twist in their definition of “loading.” When the customer
takes the machine home and starts it up for the first time, the
Microsoft boot manager appears — but the BeOS is nowhere in sight.
It seems the OEM interpreted Microsoft’s licensing provisions to mean
that the boot manager
could not be modified to display non-Microsoft systems. Furthermore,
the icon for the BeOS launcher — a program that lets the user shut
down Windows and launch the BeOS — doesn’t appear on the Windows
desktop; again, the license agreement prohibits the display of
“unapproved” icons. To boot the “loaded” BeOS, the customer must read
the documentation, fish a floppy from the box and finish the
installation. Clever.
One suspects that Linux suffers from the same fealty to Microsoft’s
licensing strictures. Linux is the culmination of 30 years of
development by the Unix community. Surely an OEM can’t complain
about Linux’s quality or its price: It’s good, and it’s free. If
Microsoft licensees are as free to choose as Microsoft claims they
are, why isn’t Linux factory installed on *any* PC?
If you randomly purchase 1,000 PC clones, how many have any OS other
than Windows loaded at the factory? Zero.
But what about all these announcements from companies such as IBM,
Dell, and others? A few URLs are supplied here for your convenience:
<http://www.dell.com/products/workstat/ISV/linux.htm>
<http://www.compaq.com/isp/news_events/index.htm>
<http://www.compaq.com/newsroom/pr/1998/wa111298a.html>
<http://www.hp.com/pressrel/jan99/27jan99.htm>
<http://www.hp.com/pressrel/jan99/27jan99b.htm>
<http://www.software.ibm.com/data/db2/linux/>
If you parse the statements, Linux is offered and supported on servers,
not on PCs. Another IBM story is that installation is to be performed
by the reseller on some PCs or laptops, not by IBM at the factory.
As an industry insider gently explained to me, Microsoft abides by a
very simple principle: No cracks in the wall. Otherwise, water will
seep in and sooner or later the masonry will crumble.
Guarding against even the smallest crack is important to Microsoft,
because it prevents a competitor from taking advantage of a phenomenon
that economists call the “network effect.” The “network effect”
manifests itself as an exponential increase in the value of a product
or service when more people use it. Applied to a computer operating
system, the effect works like this: As more people install and use an
OS, the demand for applications increases. Developers respond to the
demand, which attracts the attention of OEMs and
resellers, who promote the OS in order to sell the apps, which attracts
more customers… The key to all this is distribution and visibility —
in other words, “shelf space.”
Bill Gates understands the network effect well — he once quoted it to
me, chapter and verse. In the Fall of 1983, when I was still running
Apple France, I met with Bill in Paris and we got into a conversation
regarding the market share limitations of DOS. No problem, he said, with
the wide distribution we enjoy, we’ll get the attention of third
parties, and the marketplace will fix these shortcomings.
This puts statements by senior Microsoft executive Paul Maritz in
perspective. In reaction to my claim that Be wants to co-exist with
Microsoft, Mr. Maritz said (as quoted by Joseph Nocera in Fortune
Magazine):
“[Gassee is] articulating his strategy for entry into the
operating system marketplace. But on the other hand, I
know that Be has built a full-featured operating system,
so what I believe he’s doing here is outlining his
strategy about how he will initially co-exist with Windows
and, over time, attract more applications to his
platform.”
Mr. Nocera interpreted Mr. Maritz’s interpretation thus:
“In other words, Gassee’s spiel is little more than a
trick intended to lull Microsoft. But Microsoft isn’t so
easily fooled! Microsoft will never ignore a potential
threat to its Windows fortress, no matter how slight. The
software giant may be in the middle of an antitrust trial,
but — as Andy Grove says — only the paranoid survive…”
[The entire article, part of a court house diary, can be found
at <http://www.pathfinder.com/fortune/1999/03/01/mic3.html>.]
Industry sages such as T.J. Rodgers, the CEO of Cypress Semiconductors,
as well as venture capitalists aligned with Microsoft, criticize the
Department of Justice’s intervention in the new Pax Romana we’re
supposed to enjoy under Microsoft’s tutelage. Don’t compete in court,
compete in the marketplace, they say.
I’m a free marketer myself; I left a statist environment for the level
playing field created by the rule of law in this, my adopted country. A
free market is *exactly* what we want. One where a PC OEM isn’t
threatened by financial death for daring to offer operating systems
that compete with the Windows monopoly.
We started with a thought experiment. We end with a real-life offer for
any PC OEM that’s willing to challenge the monopoly: Load the BeOS on
the hard disk so the user can see it when the computer is first booted,
and the license is free. Help us put a crack in the wall.
This is not a healthy state of trade, is it? Intel is constantly accused of using the same tricks and breaking the law. █
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Posted in Law, Microsoft, GNU/Linux, Apple, Novell, Patents, Courtroom, IBM, Google at 6:15 am by Roy Schestowitz
Keith Bergelt joined OIN a few months ago and there’s finally a video interview that serves as an introduction.
From Linux.com:
Linux.com correspondent R. Scott Belford caught up with Open Invention Network CEO Keith Bergelt at the 2008 LinuxWorld Expo and had a pleasant (on-camera) conversation with him.
OIN has been a rather low-profile establishment, whose function is unknown to many people. it was symbolised by Jerry Rosenthal, who is a former IBMer that decided to leave and there are changes coming up.
“OIN has been a rather low-profile establishment, whose function is unknown to many people.”They seem to have adopted a disappointing approach, whereby people just accept software patents and end up playing the same game in a way which does not neutralise patent trolls (unlike ESP). On the other hand, it serves as an effective deterrent that may suppress aggression from Microsoft, assuming it does not summon proxies [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10]. LiMo has a similar effect which — if maximised — renders the patent system moot.
With or without OIN, the Free Desktop continues to be crippled and encumbered by the artificial limitations of intellectual monopolies. Here’s just one new example:
Also note that, while I hate the subpixel (RGB) hinting, there is no official statement that the subpixel algorithm is covered by patents (except for a developer’s comment in a source file). Officially, i.e. here, only Apple’s patents on the BCI are mentioned. So what is all the subpixel fuss about? Stupid lawyers?
This is neither the first time nor an isolated case where Apple’s patents stifle Free software development. TrueType was also discussed in the past, the context being Novell and SUSE. Neither Novell nor Apple are friends of Free software and both are obliged to support Microsoft’s OOXML. Yesterday from the news in India:
There has never been a more intense global industry debate over open standards. On the one hand is Microsoft’s OOXML file format backed by Apple, Novell, Wipro, Infosys, TCS, and Nasscom.
Isn’t it just beautiful to see Novell and Apple listed among Microsoft’s very close partners [1, 2, 3, 4]? They are on a similar boat.
Novell shares its patent pool with Microsoft, not just with OIN. Whose side is it on?
Monopolies or shared monopolies are ‘trusts’ and anti-trust laws were created to combat them. A free market gravitates towards predatory capitalism and it will further deteriorate without intervention. Regulation is often intercepted using political corruption. Why are no regulators stepping in? Why is it that the Asian authorities need to pressure the US Government to do something?
Patents harm developers while making solicitors rich. Watch the effect of intellectual monopolies on Qualcomm’s financial situation.
CEO Paul Jacobs, in his opening address to the collected mass ranks of US and European analysts, turned this image on its head – expressing his “palpable relief” that the Nokia patents dispute had been resolved – and on terms that will not wreck the greater part of Qualcomm’s profits – those through royalty payments, and talked about having been smashed around for the past three years, and that now that it was over, the settlement driving huge positive momentum for his company.
[…]
Jacobs added: “We are not quite so worried about that action since we have workarounds for the Broadcom patents which are already in chips, and that give us negotiating leverage. We have worked through multiple decision trees on the outcomes of that legal action and although we’d like to see it resolved, whichever way its goes it will not have as great an effect as the Nokia action.”
More on Qualcomm and Nokia in [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17]. While on the subject of patent trolls and legal harassment, Google has been attacked again. As always, unsurprisingly, it takes place in the Eastern District of Texas.
Software maker GraphOn has filed suit against search giant Google, alleging that Google’s Base, AdWords, Blogger, Sites, and YouTube services violate GraphOn’s patents
GraphOn, based in Santa Cruz, Calif., acquired the patents through its acquisition of Network Engineering Software, a privately held network software company, in 2005. The suit was filed in United States District Court in the Eastern District of Texas.
In other news, Dell’s ridiculous attempt to obtains an intellectual monopoly on “cloud computing” has just been shot down.
Dell has lost its bid to trademark the widely-used term “cloud computing”.
The computer giant had filed an application to trademark the phrase with the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) in March 2007.
However, according to blogger Sam Johnston, Dell’s application was officially rejected by the USPTO late last week.
Can the USPTO restore patent sanity too? Ownership pertaining to thought, not just art (copyright) and objects, does not belong in civilization. Business method and software patents must end. The sooner, the better. █
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08.18.08
Posted in Formats, Microsoft, Novell, Deception, Mono, Standard, OpenDocument, SUN, Java, Open XML, IBM, ISO at 4:52 am by Roy Schestowitz
Details begin to surface about ISO’s decision to give countries in search of justice… well, the finger [1, 2, 3]. ISO has come to the point where its goal is to give OOXML a thumbs-up and pretend that all that corruption never existed.
ISO seems to have done something similar to what Novell and Microsoft did in order to equip their marketing departments and Microsoft did to promote Windows Vista. They conduct surveys or polls that are hugely biased. It’s almost as though they are rigged by design. Watch what they did this time around:
I have now received the actual voting results for the IEC vote, and an indecipherable screenshot of the ISO votes. I’ll hope to add the ISO votes later on when I get more comprehensible information, but in the meantime, here are the IEC results.
In each case, the questions included in the ballot were the same:
a) Not to process the appeal any further
b) To process one or more of the appeals, which would require setting up of a conciliation panel
Rob Weir has seen this by now and he is angry because it’s clear that they asked the wrong questions with the intention of cleaning up the mess and sweeping the abuse under a rug.
So the results in the SMB ballot are highly tainted by a poorly written ballot question, given to them by the Secretaries General, which clearly caused confusion among the SMB votes, and which had a material effect on the voting results. My analysis of IEC/SMB shows that like ISO/TMB’s vote, the results are nearly equally divided, and IEC/SMB should hang their head in shame if they persist in denying a hearing to these four appeals because of ambiguous results from a poorly written, botched ballot.
Where have we heard this before?
“This was horrible, egregious, process abuse and ISO should hang their heads in shame for allowing it to happen.”
–Tim Bray
ISO drips bias. Its goal was to defend its reputation through denial. It’s a pattern [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] and it’s hugely appalling.
Meanwhile, the news gets filled with disinformation like this:
Posted by Zealot on 08/17/08 in Microsoft
[…]
Typically Microsoft, rather then settling on the readily available OpenDocument standard developed by Sun…
It is not developed by Sun! The critics, in this case an author called “Zealot”, keep trying to put a company name on the face of ODF. It’s disinformation, period. It’s intended to make it seem like a battle between peers, as opposed to one company (Microsoft) against the entire world, which includes companies, independent developers, academic institutions, businesses and home users. OpenMalaysia once wrote: “what is the point is that we have collectively, globally, bore witness to an awesome display of power by a single corporation. Awesome. Ruthless, even.
To set the record straight on ODF, from an Indian perspective comes (fresh off the news):
On the other is the Open Document Format (ODF), supported by the likes of IBM, Sun Microsystems, Red Hat, Google, the Department of Information Technology (DIT), National Informatics Centre (NIC), CDAC, IIT-Mumbai and IIM-Ahmedabad.
Microsoft technologies are exclusionary and isolative by design (see this for details). In that respect, OOXML and .NET have something in common.
Java was cross-platform. Microsoft could not permit such ‘abomination’, so it tried to ‘extend’ so as to ruin it or make it Windows-reliant. Failing that, .NET, along with the illusion de Icaza helps create that .NET will work on other platforms (as a second-class citizen under the patent sword, of course), Microsoft tried to replace Java, somewhat of an analogical equivalent of ODF. █
“That particular meeting was followed by an anonymous smear campaign against one of the TC members. A letter was faxed to the organization of the TC member in question, accusing the TC member in question of helping politicize the issue (which is, of course, untrue). I too had the dubious pleasure of hearing first hand how Microsoft attempted to remove me from the TC (they did not succeed, thanks to integrity and cojones of the organization I am affiliated with).”
“If this unethical behaviour by Microsoft was not sufficiently despicable, they did the unthinkable by involving politics in what should have been a technical evaluation of the standard by writing to the head of the Malaysian standards organization and getting its business partners to engage in a negative letter writing campaign to indicate lack of support of ODF in the Malaysian market. Every single negative letter on ODF received by the Malaysian standards organization was written either by Microsoft, or a Microsoft business partner or a Microsoft affiliated organization (Initiative for Software Choice and IASA).“
A Memo to Patrick Durusau
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08.14.08
Posted in Microsoft, Novell, OpenDocument, Europe, Open XML, IBM, OpenOffice, FOSS at 8:30 pm by Roy Schestowitz
…While another state officially moves to OOo/ODF
Novell supports OOXML simply because it’s contractually obliged to do so. It made itself a slave of Microsoft in exchange for money. Watch what Novell’s Web site said about data formats before signing the deal that nuked criticism of Microsoft (Web pages disappeared or got replaced).
From the site, like it used to be until ca. 2006:
“Why all the fuss? Modern governments generate a vast number of digital files. From birth certificates and tax returns to criminal DNA records, the documents must be retrievable in perpetuity. So governments are reluctant to store official records in the proprietary formats of commercial-software vendors. This concern will only increase as e-government services, such as filing a tax return or applying for a driving licence online, gain momentum. In Microsoft’s case, security flaws in its software, such as those exploited by the recent Blaster and SoBig viruses, are also a cause of increasing concern.”
Amen to what used to be one of Novell’s brightest moments.
That explains why OOXML is so dangerous (and why decision makers should read that 1,600+ paper about its internals before deploying it), and it explains why we should rather use ODF instead.
He mentions security, which indeed may be a problem.
In the above, Wolfgang Lonien uses the Munich example. Watch this about SoftMaker Office 2008
Beim Einlesen und Exportieren von OpenDocument-Dateien bleiben Zeilennummerierungen erhalten.
The case study of Munich aside, the big new conversion comes from Malaysia again (arguably a ‘domino effect’). The State of Kedah embraces ODF and Free software.
A case study submitted to the Open Source Competency Center by the Center of Information Technology, Office of the Chief Minister and State Secretary of Kedah, has indicated that OpenOffice.org has been installed in 70% of the computers in the Kedah state government agencies. There are currently 2,202 installed seats and by the looks of it, the numbers will just keep rising!
Should it therefore be surprising that Bob Sutor suggests OOXML is a dead-end format?
During the LinuxWorld Expo in San Francisco, I met with Bob Sutor, IBM’s vice president of open source and standards. We discussed document standards and the implications of ISO’s controversial decision to grant fast-track approval to Microsoft’s Office Open XML (OOXML) format.
Allegations of procedural irregularities in the OOXML approval process have raised serious questions about the integrity of ISO. Some national standards bodies complained that their views were disregarded or ignored during the OOXML ballot resolution meeting because of unreasonable time constraints. Some critics fear that the problems that arose during the ISO evaluation of OOXML will contribute to disillusionment and apathy towards open standards.
[…]
I asked him if he thinks that ISO approval of OOXML will drive implementors and adopters away from ODF. He has seen no evidence of such a trend and argued that uptake of OOXML has been slow. He claimed that the complexity of the standard has deterred acceptance and said that Microsoft’s next-generation office suite hasn’t significantly accelerated usage of OOXML in the wild. The vast majority of existing documents are already in the old binary formats and he contends that many users of Office 2007 still save new documents in the binary formats to accommodate compatibility with the older version. He thinks that implementors want to tap into that massive legacy document base and don’t see much value yet in supporting OOXML in their software.
More about these latest events here:
Government officials often point out how cheap licenses have become. Better competition drives the margins down. Good for Yoon Kit and his Schadenfreude humour. Good for Yoon Kit as a tax payer. Good or bad for business? That depends on your interests. From a procurement perspective you need to avoid all vendor dependencies, reduce procurement costs and put the vendor in chains if you can. A behaviour as moral or immoral as when you are on the sales side and attempt the opposite. Microsoft early understood the need to regard interoperability control as crucial for its business. The awareness among procurement agencies is on the rise to pay similar attention to the strategic importance of procurement policies and interoperability promotion. But also on the sales side of the medal it is a fight between one and many.
it is true that OOXML faces some high barriers now . But… remember what Microsoft’s Mahugh said in Malaysia about OOXML (in the Fast Track):
“It’s a Simple Matter of [Microsoft’s] Commercial Interests!”
Selfishness is passé. Novell’s gradual demise is proof of this. █
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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.