05.14.08
Posted in Microsoft, Office Suites, OpenDocument, Europe, Interoperability, Open XML, OpenOffice at 10:49 pm by Roy Schestowitz
To those who think that Microsoft’s OOXML scandals are over, looking a little further is recommended.
Microsoft Penalises ODF
There are several examples of situations where Microsoft not only promotes OOXML but also actively works against ODF [1, 2]. By its very nature in fact, OOXML is a case against ODF and it’s anti-competitive. But there’s more to it. Watch this analysis which seems to confirm that Microsoft makes ODF look bad, whether deliberately or not [1, 2].
Can someone explain to me why Microsoft Office needs almost 10 minutes to load an ODF file that OpenOffice can load in 14 seconds?
Microsoft Plays Politics Against ODF
You might still recall the maddening situation in France. Groklaw has a little update (translation) on it. The article is here and it’s in French. Part of Groklaw’s translation (from Sean Daly):
The article explains how the head of the DGME in charge of editing the RGI was sacked and replaced following that visit and this letter. Lemaire points out numerous errors and omissions in the document and points out in particular how Microsoft claims to have always been neutral:
“Microsoft, in the name of pluralism and technological neutrality of the State, has requested that OpenXML, open standard, rights-free and documented, in the sense of Article 4 of the LCEN, be recommended also alongside the standard called ODF. Microsoft has always presented a position which is balanced and neutral, asking that equal treatment be respected.”
Speaking of sacking & replacing, be sure to learn how ISO got sort of shuffled and other people met the wrath of Microsoft. Examples include:
Referring to the scandal from France, watch what a government delegate had to say.
Microsoft Won’t Inter-operare
BECTA’s complaint has already been mentioned in [1, 2], but here is another decent article covering this latest debacle, which generated a lot of press coverage.
ODF on the Rise
In this interview with Louis Suarez-Potts it turns out that ODF is doing pretty well indeed, despite all of the corruption we have been tracking for over a year. Microsoft not playing by the rules is bound to make OOXML look bad.
Q: How has the OOXML’s approval affected ODF’s penetration?
Louis : Zero.
[…]
Q: What do you see for the OOo and ODF community in the years to come?
Louis : Glory. I mean it. What is the future, I could ask, of Firefox? Will IE7 kill it? No. People appreciate freedom and what it brings, for it brings innovation and the possibility of it. And it brings, implicitly, community—by which I mean a coming together of interests that are not only generated by and dependent upon marketing agendas.
Call for Real Standards (Like ODF) in Europe
Several large European nations have already decided to ignore OOXML and more backlash ensued. Now comes openparliament.eu where you are encouraged to drop your signature if you live in Europe. It can be summarised thusly:
Citizens and stakeholder groups should not have to use the software of a single company in order to communicate with their elected officials or participate in the legislative process.
All companies should be given the chance to compete freely for contracts to supply ICT services to the European Parliament.
Under the shadow of imbalanced press it may be difficult to see the full picture, but ODF is doing pretty well. Declining sales of Microsoft Office, according to Microsoft’s latest quarterly report could — just could — be an indicator of this. As we last stressed yesterday, Microsoft is playing financial game. █
“Unregulated, and illegal, monopoly domination of IT technology that affects virtually every sector of society is a VERY BAD THING, and worth taking a stand in opposition.”
–Linux Today comment
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05.13.08
Posted in Microsoft, GNU/Linux, Europe, Antitrust, Interoperability, Open XML, FOSS at 12:10 am by Roy Schestowitz
Not so fast, BECTA!
Several months ago BECTA complained about OOXML, Windows Vista, and Microsoft Office 2007. It was not an issue of cost. This came after BECTA’s long and rather disturbing love affair with Microsoft. An accomplice claiming innocence?
It is interesting to find BECTA’s referral of an interoperability complaint [via Bob Sutor[ to the European Commission because BECTA too has come under pressure for its anti-competitive moves which blindly favoured a single vendor while completely excluding the rest (refusing to think outside the box) and for keeping decisions away from the taxpayers’ eyes. BECTA tries to pass liability. Here if what the BECTA site states at the moment:
Becta welcomes the European Commission’s antitrust investigation of Microsoft concerning interoperability and confirms it has recently referred its interoperability complaint and supporting evidence to the Commission.
Interoperability is just part of a much broader issue for BECTA. Another issue are the payments to Microsoft for each PC in the educational system, regardless of what operating system and software it actually runs (it’s similar to the OEM-level abuses). BECTA tried to pass liability when it spoke to Sirius IT.
“By attempting to push Office 2007 into the educational cycle, using considerable discounts at times, Microsoft hopes to ‘poison’ the whole environment with documents that can only be properly interpreted and opened by Microsoft software.”When it comes to interoperability, however, it’s important to remember that Microsoft almost forces children not to use ‘other’ office suites, such as OpenOffice.org, even at home. By attempting to push Office 2007 into the educational cycle, using considerable discounts at times, Microsoft hopes to ‘poison’ the whole environment with documents that can only be properly interpreted and opened by Microsoft software.
This is sheer abuse and it was part of the plan all along. Over at Groklaw, a complaint was made about a totally backwards article from Neil McAllister (PCWorld), who uses Office 2007 compatibility as the yardstick to judge office suites by, as opposed to looking at international standards like ODF, which Microsoft refuses to embrace (giving it a very low score, as deserved).
A small panel including two people from PCWorld brought up and articulated some of the pains of OOXML, even in offices that revolve all around Microsoft products. The Open Malaysia blog has some of the text.
Its also funny that the segment before this was about the April Fools pranks which occurred online. I think its quite unfortunate for Microsoft that their hollow victory (if its one at all) would fall on April the First. Well, whether the joke’s on us or not, OOXML to me will always be remembered as the April Fools’ Standard.
As the item above hopefully shows its readers, even those who are loyal and exclusive users of Microsoft software are suffering from OOXML. Was the format’s intention merely to move goalposts for rivals and to add the anti-GPL clauses, using software patents? █
“Software companies and other businesses are watching closely as a U.S appeals court weighs whether an inventor can patent an abstract process — something that involves nothing more than thoughts.”
–U.S. appeal raises business method patent issues
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05.06.08
Posted in Law, Microsoft, GNU/Linux, Novell, Asia, Interoperability, FOSS at 2:25 am by Roy Schestowitz
Intellectual Monopoly Propaganda (IMP) World Tour reaches the Philippines
Image from Wikimedia
The following snippets from a news article contain propaganda terms such as “piracy” and “IPR”. The article also comes from a publication that typically published pro-Microsoft agenda. The intention here is to show you just how Microsoft overrides local laws and pushes software patents onto those who must not accept them. Mind the use of the word “patents” (never “software patents”), which is never accidental for the same reason that patents are lumped in with ‘harder’ laws such as trademarks when Microsoft speaks of “intellectual monopoly [sic].”
Despite recent strides made by the government and the private sector in combating piracy, the Philippines remains an intellectual property rights (IPR) hotspot in the region especially in terms of “optical media” and software.
[…]
[Microsoft’s] Smith explained the decision to promote software inter-operability does not mean that the company has gone totally soft on the value it places on its proprietary software, on which it spends billions of dollars.
[…]
“But then if open-source software is distributed commercially, for example by a company or used commercially by a company, then we would expect people to think about our patent rights,” Smith said. “And if they need a patent license, they could come and get one from us.”
Aside from the fact that Microsoft is trying to extract money from Free software which it does not own or contributes to (its sole contribution to it being smears and intimidation), Microsoft knows that software patents hold no water in this country, so it’s still trying hard to sell ’snake oil’ or FUD, just as Novell recently did in China.
“Microsoft knows that software patents hold no water in this country, so it’s still trying hard to sell ’snake oil’ or FUD, just as Novell recently did in China.”Unfortunately, Microsoft and Novell work together to quietly make the patent systems more universal, harmonised, i.e. assimilated to the broken system in the United States. And that’s just bad news. Groklaw too has commented on the article above. To quote Pamela’s questions in full: “in countries that don’t recognize software patents as being legitimate, like the Philippines, why does Microsoft offer a patent license? Also, note that this is confirmation that the new interoperability deal from Microsoft is only for noncommercial use, which in FOSS means nothing, since it’s pretty much all both noncommercial and commercial. Finally, Microsoft is pushing the concept that without patent protection, there will be no innovation, but Microsoft built its monopoly without patent protection, a fairly new thing in the US. So were they not innovating?”
We addressed that last point quite recently. Microsoft wants walled gardens now that it’s deep inside, mooching off the entire industry.
To those who believe this whole charade is acceptable, it’s worth reminding and bearing in mind that, as the India Daily pointed out recently, we develop a generation where cyber-slaves in developing countries actually replace programmers in a competitive and truly innovative market. One emperer maintains the exclusive right to develop proprietary (suppressing custom-made) software while an army of exploited technical support people do the rest. This is middle-age-esque tyranny, as opposed to a true capitalistic market. And if you think that’s bad, just watch what Bank of America is currently patenting.
Bank of America seeks to patent abandoning America
Bank of America believes Americans to be overloaded with “a high salary, good benefits, a good work environment, vacation time, and other job-related perks.” For shame!
But have no fear, Bank of America has submitted a patent application that will help companies find places to get work done where such pesky things as nice salaries, good benefits, good work environments, and vacation time are abandoned.
Also in the Financial Times:
Investment banks turn off IT recruitment
The financial crisis is starting to take its toll on the jobs market for IT staff, with investment banks cutting back on recruitment as the credit crunch forces them to reduce costs.
Speaking of other patent evils, watch this RAND-like cunning plan to further abuse the market, courtesy of Nortel.
Nortel has shunned an industry initiative designed to ensure that intellectual property disputes and licensing fees do not hamper the introduction of future mobile technology, but has come out with a licence fee for its own intellectual property that it says is competitive.
Who gets to define “competitive”, which is another propaganda term (turning a negative to a positive), just like “reasonable” or “fair”? This is completely incompatible with Free software and letting mobile communication rely on proprietary technology is akin to charging people for fetching a Web page (paying just one company for imaginary intellect) — something that’s close to being a reality if Novell and Microsoft successfully infect the Web with Silverblight [sic]. █
“Since when has the world of computer software design been about what people want? This is a simple question of evolution. The day is quickly coming when every knee will bow down to a silicon fist, and you will all beg your binary gods for mercy.”
–Bill Gates
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05.01.08
Posted in Microsoft, Windows, Deception, Interoperability, FOSS at 9:46 am by Roy Schestowitz
Not our own words, but there you go…
In our previous posts about Interop [1, 2, 3], which “is Effectively a Noop”, we presented the views of Matt Asay and Joe Wilcox, among others. Not many people are buying this sham and here is some further evidence and interpretations. This new analogy you are probably going to fancy.
After thinking for a bit, I then realize this is the exact same corporate strategy Microsoft has pursued with Active Directory. Release a trojan horse into a corporation by making an inferior, arguably broken, operating system, Windows, that won’t work with anything else, or follow the same standards, and then release a steaming pile of bandages, duck tape, glue, and well…poo, and make everyone authenticate against it while charging an expensive licensing fee.
We have active bot nets that rivel NASA in pure computing power due to boneheaded Operating System design…
How about NAC? We wrote about this before when we mentioned the insightful renarks from Charles Cooper (of CNET). Cisco and Microsoft chose what they call interoperability [sic] (should say “intraoperability”) over what Charles referred to as “openness” (standards, not exclusive bridges). Here comes an update on the sad NAC situation.
The Interop Labs test of NAC interoperability showed little participation by vendors that support checking endpoints running Linux and Mac OS X.
This is hardly a surprise given the source of initiation for NAC. How about this little update from Matt Asay?
Microsoft, openness, and oxymorons
[…]
Let’s compare this openness pledge to Microsoft’s reality with Sharepoint, as but one example. If you want to use Microsoft’s Sharepoint, you must use Microsoft’s SQL Server, Windows, Office, IIS, Active Directory, etc. It also works much better with Internet Explorer, and is crippled in Firefox, Safari, etc.
Are we to assume that Microsoft has seen the light and is now embracing openness as its salvation? Not likely.
He finally appears to be hitting the right drum. Microsoft is just trying to ensure that “open source” is tied to its cash cows so that even a simple Apache deployment need be accompanied by the purchase of a proprietary Microsoft stack, potentially costing around $1000 over time. To Microsoft, open source is just an ISV and it won’t let its bread and butter (cash cows) simply go any time soon, unless harsh reality intrudes. It will just carry on pretending to have OSS affinity because it needs to lure in (read: exploit) innocent developers. █
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Posted in Microsoft, Windows, GNU/Linux, Novell, Opensuse, Servers, Interoperability, Virtualization, xandros at 6:31 am by Roy Schestowitz
We probably ought to post this as an update to a previous post which claimed that Microsoft excludes everyone but its software patent partners, at least this time around. Although the claim was made based on some shallow fast-checking and Matt Asay’s rather hasty conclusions-jumping, an early comment posted in Matt Asay’s blog begs to correct him and say that the beta from Microsoft supports Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 too. Mary Jo Foley’s post seems to concur.
For what it’s worth, here is the story Xandros tells (press release appended below) and the story Microsoft tells (also appended. It’s mainly Microsoft’s software patent partners that speak up in the press, which may prove deceiving.
In other more-or-less interesting news, mind this post about contributing to an agenda of ‘control freaks’ that foster a so-called community of developers.
I agree - letting go of control is hard. And I’ve seen many companies struggle with it - Xara, Wengo, Sun, to name a few, and other companies skirt the issue by unashamedly keeping control - Trolltech, MySQL, Alfresco, JBoss, SugarCRM come to mind. It’s a question of expectations. When a company says “sure, we’re happy to work with you, on our terms”, you know where you stand.
But starting a project on Sourceforge, putting 4 years worth of code on there, telling your team of (proprietary) software developers “now you commit there”, and then expecting that Poof! like magic little Code Gnomes start appearing from out of nowhere to make your project better is unrealistic. It really is the difference between “organic” (grown from scratch, by developers for developers) and “non-organic” (code is liberated en masse) projects. If you have absolutely no governance guidelines whatsoever, who’s the maintainer? The manager who manage[ds] the development team in your lab? How well does that work?
We mentioned in the past — on several occasions in fact — just why OpenSUSE volunteers are simply being used, exploited (more details in Groklaw, which calls it “Brains for Sale”).
It now turns out that that Novell’s principal booster (and community manager of OpenSUSE) was in Seattle, just like some other people who changed significantly after their journey [1, 2, 3, 4]. Here is just the gist of it.
Sitting in the Seattle-Tacoma airport now waiting for a flight, I’m wishing the weekend hadn’t flown by quite so quickly. I look forward to being here again next year.
Shortly afterwards came the longer post:
The announcement went out today that Novell and Microsoft are collaborating around the OpenPegasus project and other system management tools.
Thanks to Novell, Microsoft is going to be contributing to several open source projects — and making Linux easier to manage. Yes, you read that right. It will also make Windows easier to manage using Linux tools — which is going to be a breath of fresh air for Linux admins tasked with managing Windows boxen as well.
[…]
Microsoft will also be submitting some code under one of its OSI-approved licenses.
It’s not the GPL of course and NetworkWorld’s Microsoft Subnet is already poking some fun at what it calls “open source advocates” (link omitted intentionally). It will be interesting to watch how close the leadership of OpenSUSE is bound to grow to Microsoft. █
Xandros Debuts Heterogeneous Systems Center Capabilities at Microsoft Management Summit
Xandros, Inc., a leading provider of mixed-environment management tools, intuitive Linux solutions, and Scalix e-mail services, today announced the beta presentation of Xandros BridgeWays Management Packs at the Microsoft Management Summit. This release is the first in a series of BridgeWays Management Packs designed to help extend the capabilities of the Microsoft System Center to heterogeneous environments. The new management packs will enable system administrators to monitor and manage Apache and MySQL on Windows, Linux, and Solaris from within the Microsoft Systems Center Operations Manager 2007. Developed under the broad collaboration agreement between Microsoft and Xandros announced in June 2007, the management packs released today will be followed by others for such key data center applications as Oracle Database, Oracle Application Server, IBM WebSphere, and VMware.
“Xandros’ expertise in open source and its delivery of management packs, which utilize the Operations Manager 2007 Cross Platform Extensions for the management of Apache and MySQL on Windows, Linux and Solaris, provides key functionality for extending the benefits of System Center across the heterogeneous enterprise,” said Robert Reynolds, director of System Center product management at Microsoft Corp. “The rapid pace at which Xandros was able to deliver these offerings and its road map for future solutions will provide our mutual customers with a wide variety of options for managing applications across their environments through a single management experience, and we look forward to our continued work together.”
“The System Center Operations Manager 2007 Cross Platform Extensions have already delivered exciting results for Xandros. They enabled us to cut our expected development time in half as we created our management packs for Apache and MySQL running on Linux and Solaris, resulting in quicker time to market and delivery of betas to our customers today,” said Andreas Typaldos, CEO of Xandros. “This new foundation from Microsoft enabled us to focus on the development of high-level management functions for applications, with the knowledge that the Cross Platform Extensions were providing the necessary underlying interfaces to System Center Operations Manager, enabling heterogeneous management from a single location across customer environments.”
Showcased at Microsoft Management Summit
Previews of the Xandros BridgeWays Management Packs for Apache and MySQL are showcased at the Xandros booth at the Microsoft Management Summit at Las Vegas, Nevada, April 28-May 2, 2008. The beta software is also available as a free download for testing and review from the Xandros web site at www.xandros.com.
About Xandros
Xandros, Inc. is a leading provider of mixed-environment BridgeWays management tools and intuitive Linux solutions including SMB and enterprise servers, consumer and business desktops, OEM products, and mission-critical applications. Xandros subsidiary Scalix provides the premier e-mail, calendaring and messaging solutions based on open standards and open source. Xandros and Scalix foster Linux adoption with graphical products that leverage existing skill sets while providing seamless Windows-Linux interoperability. Xandros server and management tools feature workflow automation and centralized remote deployment and administration. The company is headquartered in New York with research and development facilities in Ottawa, Europe, and Mumbai, and sales and support offices worldwide. For more information, please visit www.xandros.com.
Xandros® is a registered trademark of Xandros, Inc. All other trademarks and/or registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
Xandros Contact:
Xenia von Wedel
Terpin Communications Group
1-415-595-2030
Email Contact
Xandros sales and other inquiries:
1-613-842-3494
Microsoft Expands Datacenter Management Offerings With Advanced Heterogeneous and Virtualization Capabilities
New Microsoft System Center solutions for management of multivendor virtualization, operating systems and applications available for customer evaluation.
LAS VEGAS, April 29 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — Today, before an audience of more than 4,000 IT professionals and partners at the Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) 2008, Bob Muglia, senior vice president of the Server and Tools Business at Microsoft Corp., outlined the next phase in the company’s strategy to enable dynamic IT organizations. As part of this strategy, Muglia announced technology innovations that are designed to expand Microsoft’s virtualization capabilities and introduced its use of open source technologies and industry standards to broaden its ability to deliver automated management of heterogeneous IT environments.
“At Microsoft we are helping redefine what it means to do IT management in the enterprise with the new capabilities we are announcing today,” Muglia said. “By taking our knowledge of the Windows environment and expanding it to address heterogeneous management needs across platforms, applications, hardware and virtualization, we are opening up a new level of opportunity for companies to drive greater efficiency, responsiveness and value for their business.”
As IT environments grow more diverse and complex across desktops, datacenters, physical and virtual deployments, and heterogeneous infrastructures spanning Windows and non-Windows environments, Microsoft has worked closely with customers to deliver a comprehensive enterprise strategy for an integrated management solution. The announcements today build on the strong, existing Microsoft System Center presence in the datacenter with key additions in the areas of cross-platform, expanded interoperability and multivendor virtualization management solutions, which are further extended by the contributions of a strong and growing partner ecosystem.
Extending Cross-Platform Management for the Datacenter
Microsoft today announced the availability of a public beta for System Center Operations Manager 2007 Cross Platform Extensions, which build on the existing Operations Manager 2007 technology and capabilities and are designed to help customers extend the value of their Microsoft System Center investments. Providing customers with a comprehensive management solution, this new end-to-end IT systems monitoring capability incorporates industry standards and proven open source technologies, including Web Services for Management (WS-Management) and OpenPegasus, extending the capabilities across both physical and virtualized Windows and non-Windows operating systems and applications. Microsoft delivers the core foundational cross-platform support out of the box for HP-UX, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Sun Solaris and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server operating systems so that partners can focus on adding their deep domain expertise in the form of management packs. Companies such as Novell Inc., Quest Software Inc. and Xandros Inc. have demonstrated their support by working to deliver monitoring abilities for applications made by organizations such as The Apache Software Foundation, MySQL AB and Oracle.
Further demonstrating support for its commitment to OpenPegasus, Microsoft also announced today that it will be joining the OpenPegasus Steering Committee and contribute code back to the open source community under the Microsoft Public License, an Open Source Initiative (OSI)-approved license.
“The System Center Operations Manager 2007 Cross Platform Extensions have already delivered exciting results for Xandros,” said Andreas Typaldos, CEO of Xandros. “They enabled us to cut our expected development time in half as we created our management packs for Apache and MySQL running on Linux and Solaris, resulting in quicker time to market and delivery of betas to our customers today. This new foundation from Microsoft enabled us to focus on the development of high-level management functions for applications, with the knowledge that the Cross Platform Extensions were providing the necessary underlying interfaces to System Center Operations Manager, enabling heterogeneous management from a single location across customer environments.”
Microsoft also delivered a beta of the updated System Center Operations Manager 2007 Connectors, based on many of the same extensible open source technology and industry standards as the Cross Platform Extensions, which provide an integrated administrative experience and the ability to interoperate and exchange System Center monitoring data with third-party management offerings such as HP OpenView and IBM Tivoli Enterprise Console.
Single Pane of Glass for Managing Virtualized and Physical IT Assets
Also delivered today was the public beta of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 (formerly code-named “Virtual Machine Manager vNext”), which enables customers to configure and deploy new virtual machines and to centrally manage their virtualized infrastructure, whether running on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 or VMware ESX Server.
System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 tightly integrates with Operations Manager 2007 to deliver a new feature called Performance and Resource Optimization (PRO). Using deep knowledge of the IT environment including operating systems, applications and hardware, Operations Manager identifies opportunities for more efficient physical and virtual resource allocation and generates “PRO tips” within the Virtual Machine Manager console. Administrators can implement these PRO tips and dynamically optimize their datacenter based upon pre-defined policies and the real-time, changing demands of users. When used in conjunction with the broad System Center management suite, System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 enables customers effectively to manage both their virtualized and physical servers and applications across their desktops and datacenters with a single set of consistent, compatible tools.
“Deploying, monitoring and managing applications across a heterogeneous IT infrastructure can present many challenges and complexities, all of which are compounded when consolidating servers, optimizing desktops and applications, or creating business continuity solutions using multiple virtualization solutions,” said Jerry Phillips, senior director of Systems Operations at Clear Channel Communications Inc. “Our experience with System Center solutions has demonstrated that Microsoft not only recognizes our need to manage our Windows datacenter infrastructure, but also non-Windows and virtual servers from other vendors. Being able to do so through a single administrative console will provide improvements in productivity and reductions in our cost of IT operations, enabling us to improve overall organizational contributions.”
A number of partners, including Brocade, Dell, EMC Corp., Emulex Corp., HP, NetQOS, QLogic Corp. and Quest, announced they will deliver management packs enabled for PRO. These management packs enable partners and customers to integrate their domain-specific knowledge directly into Virtual Machine Manager and further integrate physical and virtual management.
“Dell’s focus is to simplify IT for our customers and drive complexity out of the datacenter, and virtualization is a key technology driving this effort,” said Laurie Tolson, vice president of systems management at Dell Product Group. “By working with industry leaders like Microsoft on advances in systems management between Dell OpenManage and Microsoft Hyper-V, System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 and Windows Server 2008, we’re able to bridge the gap between the physical and virtual management spaces, providing an optimized solution that helps our customers get the most out of their hardware and virtualization investments.”
“New ways to lower energy costs, reduce server sprawl and optimize datacenters are provided by the collaboration between HP and Microsoft as virtualization goes mainstream,” said Scott Farrand, vice president of Industry Standard Server Software at HP. “Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager used alongside HP Insight software on HP ProLiant servers, and HP Server Automation software, allow customers to seamlessly manage physical and virtual environments. The combined solutions also allow customers to maximize availability, performance and flexibility of physical host servers, virtualized guest operating systems and workloads.”
Beta software of System Center Operation Manager 2007 Cross Platform Extensions, Connectors and Virtual Machine Manager 2008 were made available to attendees at the conference and can be downloaded at http://connect.microsoft.com. Customers interested in finding more information on the System Center offerings or in evaluating them through trial offerings can visit http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter and the System Center blog at http://blogs.technet.com/systemcenter.
Founded in 1975, Microsoft NASDAQ: MSFT is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential.
Website: http://www.microsoft.com//
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Posted in Microsoft, Standard, OpenDocument, Interoperability, Open XML at 6:06 am by Roy Schestowitz
“I’m thinking of hitting the OEMs harder than in the past with anti-Linux. … they should do a delicate dance.”
–Joachim Kempin, Microsoft OEM Chief
What kind of a monster would bully innocent computer scientists in order to defeat an international standard (ODF) that was created to facilitate the need of the entire industry, including universities?
It was just over a month ago that we witnessed an act of intimidation in India , wherein Microsoft proceeded to doing its usual routine of bullying critics and going all the way to the top, if necessary.
An open letter has just been composed to address or at least highlight this issue in India. It praises the final decision and insistence of the nation, but nonetheless raises the very serious concerns that public confessions brought to the media’s attention before. Have a look at some fragments from this post.
On 20th March 2008, the LITD15 committee of the Bureau of Indian Standards voted against Microsoft’s proposed OOXML standard. 29th March 2008 was the last date for participating countries to vote on OOXML. In the interval between these two dates, Microsoft went to the Prime Minister of India and alleged that this committee acted against the national interest. Fortunately, the Indian bureaucrats who met the PM did a good job of defending the committee’s vote against OOXML.
Prof. DB Phatak of IIT Bombay recently wrote a mail to the LITD15 committee saying that, “In my opinion, these actions go well beyond the behavioral boundaries for a commercial entity, some of these amounting to interfering with the governance process of a sovereign country.” IIT Bombay was a member of the LITD15 committee and Prof. Phatak was part of a four-member team at IIT Bombay that did a very intense review of OOXML before the institute voted against OOXML. While Prof. Phatak is a great supporter of open source, he also has a great reputation for being fair and balanced.
[…]
As a committee member, I would like to place on record my deep disappointment at the fact that Microsoft chose to question the decision of this committee at the highest office of our country. For over a year, we have reviewed the proposed standard with a fine tooth comb. Every opportunity was given to Microsoft to put their points across. At every meeting they brought a disproportionate number of participants along; some of these participants were not even Indian nationals. I think the committee as a whole was very courteous in accommodating all this but drew the line when this began to detract from the functioning of the committee. The only words that came to my mind when I heard that Microsoft’s complaint had prompted the Prime Minister of my country to review this committee’s decision was “stabbed-in-the-back.” This was a great disservice to this committee and the country and I hope this never happens again.
[…]
Standards cannot (and should not) be created in a technical vaccum. Without a moral and ethical framework, we cannot create standards that benefit humanity. Mahatma Gandhi summed it up best when he said that, “Real swaraj will come not by the acquisition of authority by a few but by the acquisition of capacity by all.” I believe that this committee should be focused solely on the user’s swaraj (freedom) to encode and decode their data.
Who could ever forget how far Microsoft went in India?
We will shortly return to Microsoft’s announcement from the intraoperability [sic] event, but meanwhile, this article from The Register, “Microsoft embraces and extends server promiscuity”, is worth bringing up because of the bits about OOXML.
Microsoft of course has a long way to go before it can match market VMware for virt. technology or market share. But “deep integration” with SystemCenter is the key to how it will play catch-up. And if it fails, the company will certainly hasten the day that VMWare will have to lower its prices.
[…]
A third principle is to encourage data portability, so that customers can move their data, without let or hindrance. That is entirely admirable, but the way Microsoft is working to ensure this, by way of a fourth principle - to work with all the software standards bodies on God’s planet - is the stuff of battlefields, as this year’s furore over Open XML shows. Microsoft is content to work behind the scenes, while its rivals cry foul.
When the rivals stop shouting, we will know that Microsoft truly is fully interoperable and is seen to be fully interoperable. In the meantime, we look forward to reporting the bush wars for many years to come.
The OOXML saga is far from over. The finalisation of a decision is still over a month away. █
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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.