06.29.09

Microsoft’s Assault on the Web, Rival Web Browsers, and HTML

Posted in FOSS, Interoperability, Microsoft, Standard at 4:28 am by Roy Schestowitz

Predator on the Web

Summary: Microsoft uses aggressive, dishonest marketing to promote proprietary software that interferes with standards

Microsoft has gone very aggressive in its fight against all Web browsers other than its own [1, 2, 3]. It is a repetition of “Get the Facts” as applied to Web browsers, not operating systems. As Savio Rodrigues puts it:

But this comparison table treats me like a moron, especially when you consider that I’m using Firefox and have pre-existing views on many items on the comparison table. Only IE8 gets a check for security, privacy, and ease of use? Really? At a minimum, Microsoft should have used Harvey Balls to show that the competitors have capabilities, which may not be as strong as IE8. Microsoft could have posted videos that show how easy it is to carry out a common task in IE8 and compare it to Firefox with the relevant add-on installed.

This actually begs for the story about Microsoft "sabotaging" Firefox to be brought up again [1, 2]. Here is how Microsoft’s ‘malware’ can be removed from Firefox.

Several journalists have independently been complaining that IE8 causes them great trouble. From the past week in the press we gather:

i. Thinking about upgrading to IE8? Think twice

For example: One day last month Cringester D. L. discovered when he logged onto the Net, he couldn’t get to his e-mail or view Web pages. He then enjoyed several quality hours on the phone with Dell tech support, which determined the cause: His daughter had clicked a button and updated the browser to IE8 without telling him. The support tech logged onto his computer remotely and downgraded it to IE7. Problems solved.

ii. Collateral Damage & The Browser Wars

After I downloaded IE8 two weeks ago, my Sony audio programs got hung up and wouldn’t load. When I went to the Microsoft and Sony sites and found no help, I decided I didn’t need nuanced improvements to my web surfing, and did a system restore. Oops. Then IEx wouldn’t run at all. Somehow, the update had destabilized somethingoranother. I was out of luck.

iii. Microsoft IE8 Hype Is Beyond Belief

Internet Explorer 8 is a very good browser, especially when compared to IE7 and (ugh) IE6. However, it still lags behind most of the other browsers in both performance and standards compliance. That doesn’t seem to bother Microsoft, which has been pushing IE8 using hype that they rarely use even for Windows or Office.

[...]

There is no way that Microsoft can claim anything close to parity with standards compliance of the other major browsers. For example, IE8 retains a non-standard event model that does not get anywhere close to the W3C standard published in 2000. Just a few examples: Form elements don’t bubble events. There is a global event object instead of an event argument passed to the handler. Rather than document.addEventListener, IE uses the non-standard document.attachEvent method.

As the following new article shows, Microsoft lied to the court about IE being impossible to remove from Windows. Microsoft was too busy ‘extending’ the Web in order to turn it into another vector of operating system lock-in. Nothing has changed since. Last week we showed that this serious violation came from Bill Gates himself. He wanted to make E-mail and Web pages dependent on Microsoft Office. People are still furious over this, but Microsoft is ignoring their pleas. From the news:

i. Microsoft, Outlook Is Broken, Says 6,000 Tweets (And Growing). Fix It.

While it is pretty much the standard email client, Microsoft Outlook has long had problems rendering HTML correctly in emails. And the latest version, Outlook 2010, due sometime in the next several months, doesn’t look like it’s going to be any better — and it actually may be worse. And a lot of users aren’t happy about it at all.

ii. Microsoft misses the Outlook point

Continuing a decision made in 2007 to render HTML with Word in Outlook, Microsoft confirmed that Outlook 2010 will also use Word. In response to this decision, the fixoutlook.org campaign was created in an attempt to change Microsoft’s mind.

iii. Microsoft rebuffs Twitter protest over Outlook’s rendering of HTML e-mails

Showing again the power of Twitter for quick social organizing, Microsoft Corp. on Wednesday was forced to defend itself against complaints that its market-leading Outlook e-mail program wreaks havoc on rich-HTML e-mails.

Outlook 2007 and the upcoming Outlook 2010’s use of Microsoft Word to display rich HTML content is to blame, according to blog posts by Dave Greiner, the Sydney, Australia-based organizer of the protest.

iv. Microsoft shows once again how it doesn’t listen

There’s been a lot buzz on Twitter about a movement to try and get Microsoft to backtrack on its decision to use the Word rendering engine for HTML based email in Outlook. So far some 22,000 plus Twitterers have heeded the call and visited fixoutlook.org to register their vote on this.

Antitrust regulators should grill Microsoft over it. The motives are crystal clear and they are anti-competitive. Even E-mails that were standards-based (and intended to be a commodity) are being subverted by Microsoft, which deliberately reduces interoperability between mail clients and across operating systems. █

“In one piece of mail people were suggesting that Office had to work equally well with all browsers and that we shouldn’t force Office users to use our browser. This Is wrong and I wanted to correct this.

“Another suggestion In this mail was that we can’t make our own unilateral extensions to HTML I was going to say this was wrong and correct this also.”

–Bill Gates [PDF]

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06.27.09

Lunch with Microsoft to Talk About ODF, Which it is Attacking

Posted in Deception, FUD, Microsoft, OpenDocument, Standard at 3:49 am by Roy Schestowitz

Summary: ODF — just like Java — has Microsoft getting close to it only to break it

Microsoft, an ODF Slugfest

NOT much has changed since Microsoft bought dinner for ODF panels and even flew over journalists to nice places where they got brainwashed against ODF and in favour of OOXML. In general, this practice of pampering the press to control news coverage is particularly important when the products in question are simply terrible [1, 2]. Sponsorships, beer and bribes of some form are also common and those with impact are being stalked by Microsoft. It is part of its strategy to even keep dossiers on journalists.

It is with all that in mind that we found curious the following Microsoft encounter with David Worthington from the SD Times. He was having lunch with Microsoft and they told him lies. For example:

Paoli indirectly responded to recent criticism that Microsoft was engaged in a FUD campaign against ODF (I forgot what the criticism was exactly) by pointing out that Office 2007 adds support for the format, and that Microsoft has included ODF in its developers’ tooling and plug fests.

This is a lie. Microsoft has been engaging in FUD against ODF all along [1, 2]. The examples are well documented and it continues to this date. Microsoft perhaps hopes that by having lunch with journalists it can rewrite history and make people less aware of its real motives.

Microsoft’s editing of the Wikipedia article on ODF has not quite ended yet. Here is where one can find Alex Brown and Albert (HAl) telling people what to think about ODF. Also see:

• Microsoft Starts Attacking the ODF Alliance, Sends Paid Wikipedia Editors to ODF Article (Updated)
• OOXML BRM Convenor (Alex Brown) Joins the Pro-Microsoft Wikipedia Spinners
• Microsoft Folks Rewrite ODF’s History and Build Anti-ODF Social Network
• Fraunhofer Again Lobbies for Microsoft Lock-in
• Is Microsoft’s AstroTurf Against ODF Still On?

Over at Twitter, the Microsoft partners/MVPs/others still mock IBM regarding ODF. They also mock ODF, thus showing how much Microsoft hates ODF. Microsoft gets close to ODF only to cause it damage while pretending to support it [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]. Microsoft used the exact same tactics against Java.

ODF Plugfest

In more positive news, Rob Weir shares the ODF TC timeline, which he first presented at the ODF Plugfest. There is a lot of good coverage from the Plugfest, such as this from Heise.

The first ODF Plugfest has brought together both corporate and independent developers to test the interoperability of Open Document Format (ODF) documents. As Microsoft showed earlier this year, it is possible to comply with the ODF specification but not offer useful interoperability with other software that reads ODF. The Plugfest, held in the Hague, Netherlands, was initiated by the Dutch government which is promoting the “Three Os”, Open Standards, Open Content and Open Source, and is pushing for the adoption of ODF as an open document format. The Plugfest opened with a speech from Frank Heemskerk, the Netherlands’ Minister of Foreign Trade, who asked the attendees “to go beyond compliance and help achieve broad-based open standards”.

There is also some coverage in German, not to mention the following article where a Dutch minister fails to see that ODF interoperability issues are mostly caused by Microsoft.

The Dutch Minister for Foreign Trade, Frank Heemskerk, wants Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, Google, Adobe and open source software developers to work together on interoperability in applications using the Open Document Format (ODF).

The minister’s opened the ODF Interoperability Workshop that took place in the city of The Hague on Monday last week. “ODF applications must have the right degree of interoperability. We have to come up with a joint course of action for developing effective ODF support in each other’s products.”

The FSF’s position is that “Microsoft Office tries to break ODF”. Microsoft is indeed trying to break ODF (in French), so Frank Heemskerk should be notified.

Here is KDE’s report from the event.

The first ODF Plugfest was held on the 15th and 16th of June 2009 in the Royal Library in the Netherlands. The meeting was initiated by the Dutch government and the OpenDoc Society. Jos van den Oever, brand new employee of KO GmbH and Sven Langkamp, proud developer, went on behalf of the KOffice team. With over forty organisations and a total of sixty representatives from businesses, public sector organizations, open source projects and research institutions, the meeting was an incredible success.

OpenOffice.org has meanwhile augmented language support [1, 2] and the OOo Ninja blog shows that Microsoft Office just keeps getting more and more bloated.

What’s worse is this diagnostic took at least 20 minutes to finish on a nice dual-core with 2GB RAM.

[...]

OpenOffice.org isn’t necessarily have a reptutation for being lean itself, but developers are pushing hard to make OpenOffice.org 3.2 the fastest version yet. Stay tuned for more.

Yet Microsoft insists that Office is a quality product. To ODF, Microsoft Office does more harm than good. It’s in the interest of shareholders, not computer users. █

“It’s a Simple Matter of [Microsoft’s] Commercial Interests!“

–Microsoft on OOXML

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06.21.09

Reports from ODF Plugfest, the Netherlands

Posted in Europe, OpenDocument, Standard at 7:01 pm by Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Dutch meeting promotes the use of the only interoperable document standard

• ODF Plugfest at The Hague

The Dutch government program, Netherlands in Open Connection, and the OpenDoc Society cosponsored the two-day ODF “plugfest” at the Royal Library in The Hague, 15-16 June 2009, where vendors and open source projects were able to test ODF capabilities with each other in real-world, collaborative scenarios. OASIS TC chairs, Bart Hanssens, (ODF Interoperability and Conformance TC), and Rob Weir (co-Chair ODF TC), participated and delivered presentations.

• Improving Interoperability ODF in Office Applications

Over more than forty organisations and a total of sixty representatives from businesses, public sector organisations, open source projects and research institutions, came together this Monday and Tuesday to improve the interoperability of their office applications on the implementation of the open standard Open Document Format (ODF) during the ODF Interoperability Workshop . The support for ODF as an open standard is required for Dutch government organisations in accordance with the actionplan Netherland Open in Connection . ODF is a modern and flexible exchange format for word processors, spreadsheet programs and presentation programs and offers an alternative to vendor specific file formats.

• New ODF Interoperability Initiatives Launched At Dutch Government Workshop (as PDF)

The Hague, June 17, 2009. New ODF interoperability initiatives were unveiled this week at an international conference organized by the Dutch government, which has mandated ODF for reading, writing, exchange and publication of documents and also initiated a requirement to ask for ODF when issuing or renewing IT contracts. The Dutch government program Netherlands in Open Connection (NOiV) and the OpenDoc Society cosponsored the two-day ODF “plugfest” at the Royal Library in The Hague, where vendors and open source projects were able to test their ODF capabilities with each other in real-world, collaborative scenarios.

• ODF and the Art of Interoperability

While OOXML-compliant software seems conspicuous by its absence, ODF goes from strength to strength: there is literally no contest between the rival standards in this respect.

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BSI: Got Microsoft

Posted in Europe, Microsoft, Open XML, OpenDocument, Standard at 6:48 pm by Roy Schestowitz

Summary: The BSI’s new link to Microsoft is Datawatch, a Microsoft Certified Gold Partner

GROKLAW has caught this very interesting press release. It says:

Datawatch Corporation (NASDAQ-CM: DWCH), a leader in Enterprise Information Management (EIM) and BI, today announced the appointment of its Senior Product Manager, Gareth Horton, to the British Standards Institution (BSI) Technical Committee IST/41. As a co-opted expert member of the committee, he has also been nominated to the Working Group (WG4) of ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 34, which is responsible for the ongoing maintenance of IS29500 (Office Open XML).

Pamela Jones adds: “Co-opted precisely how?”

For those who are new to the scandals of the BSI, see:

• “Money Trumps Justice”, Vendor Control Trumps Truth
• BSI Gets Sued After Microsoft’s OOXML Corruptions Worldwide
• OOXML BRM Convenor Admits British Standards Organisation (BSI) is Essentially a Fraud

To add icing to this little cake, almost exactly a year ago Datawatch announced that it continued to “Cement Partnership with Microsoft.”.

Chelmsford, Mass.—June 25, 2008—Datawatch Corporation (NASDAQ-CM: DWCH), a Microsoft Certified Gold Partner and leading provider of solutions to the Enterprise Information Management market, announces several significant achievements and activities regarding its partnership with Microsoft.

Microsoft Certified Gold Partner. No conflict of interests there, eh? The BSI has been filled with such conflicts all along. What a fiasco. █

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06.18.09

Microsoft on Competition: “We Need to Create the Reputation for Problems and Incompatibilities to Undermine Confidence”

Posted in Antitrust, FUD, IBM, Microsoft, OpenDocument, Standard at 3:56 am by Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Microsoft is vandalising not only competing products of ‘partners’ but also their reputation

YESTERDAY we wrote about saboteurs and FUD against OS/2, showing that Microsoft may have even broken the law in order to advance its agenda. Today we deal with another court exhibit, Exhibit plex_5401 (1991) [PDF]. It may be old, but it was never made widely accessible to the public, so we share it here and explain how it relates to the present.

Brad Silverberg, one of Microsoft’s most aggressive people (he said “cut those f*ckers off” when a company chose DR-DOS), is herein expressing and defining Microsoft FUD. Cameron Myhrvold, the brother of Microsoft's patent troll (Nathan Myhrvold), is in circulation as well and both are currently in Ignition Partners, which seemingly helped the hijack of Xen.

Watch what Silverberg writes:

>From bradsi Thu Oct 24 09:18:30 1991
To: samt
Subject: Re: DR DOS, will they/won’t they buy

Date: Wed Oct 23 16:16:23 1991

This is a very important point. We need to create the reputation
for problems and incompatibilies to undermine confidence
in drdos6; so people will make judgements against it without
knowing details or fats. it’s will be tricky to do;
we should dig up as many user stories as possible. compare
drdow6 to dos4; ibm has expereince will building bad/incompat
dos’s.

we should think how we can get this down.
(done).

That sounds very clearly like a plan to misbehave. Further down it is also shown that “kathybe” invites these chaps to the OS/2 briefing. She says: “I have not heard back from you.”

From kathybe Wed Oct 23 17:16:34 1991
To: adamwa alistair andys bobmu bradsi cameronm carls claraj davidt
davidtu davidwo dwaynew ericfo gregl karlst kevine markclbobt nikim
perttir randyk roberth stewc tycar vesas
Cc: Corptech
Subject: URGENT - Can You Come on 10/29?
Date: Wed Oct 23 17:13:24 PDT 1991

You were invited to attend the rehearsal presentation of the OS/2
Issue Account District Briefings on 10/29. I have not heard back from you.

We need you to review these presentations to ensure that the info
we are presenting to customers and the field is correct. We will be
doing six (6) districts over the next eight weeks which covers 70

Yesterday we saw what kind of OS/2 presentations Steve Ballmer was giving. He put in an application which was specifically designed (by Microsoft) to crash OS/2 and ruin the demonstrations.

It’s all something to bear in mind now that Microsoft is trying to prove ODF is broken. Microsoft was an IBM and OS/2 partner at this time of sabotage and FUD. Now it is pretending to be an ODF partner with IBM, Sun, Oracle, Google, Red Hat and so on. Needless to say, Microsoft is still badmouthing ODF behind the scenes and it is reducing ODF interoprability [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]. █

Appendix: Comes vs. Microsoft - exhibit plex_5401, as text

Read the rest of this entry »

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06.16.09

Reader’s Article: What Makes Microsoft’s Business Unethical

Posted in America, Antitrust, Europe, Microsoft, Office Suites, Standard at 1:50 pm by Roy Schestowitz

[Skip to the end for the Executive Summary]

With the further recent action taken against Microsoft by the EU antitrust investigators - who Microsoft “supporters” denounce as “scum”, for having the audacity to enforce the law against these gangsters, it seems the nature of Microsoft’s unethical business practises needs to be spelled out in the simplest terms, so that these “supporters” might finally understand the “problem”.

“They spread lies that Free Software alternatives to their software is “unamerican” and “communist” in nature…”I’ll omit any arguments relating to proprietary licensing, since I think I’ve already covered that quite adequately elsewhere, so instead I’ll just concentrate on how Microsoft runs its business in general, regardless of the nature of the “product”.

So here’s a simple breakdown:

• Microsoft is a business, and the purpose of any business is to make money. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, indeed it is absolutely necessary in a developed society.
• Microsoft competes with other companies for business, in order to ensure their continued operations. Again, this is perfectly reasonable and expected. Competition is good and necessary, as it drives innovation, stems inflation, and facilitates choice.
• Microsoft advertises its products, so that potential customers will be aware of them, and subsequently buy them. This is also perfectly reasonable, ostensibly. However, advertising is open to abusive practises, such as false or misleading claims, or a more recent development variously called “guerilla” or “viral” advertising, where supposedly impartial recommendations aren’t impartial at all, but are in fact paid sponsorship. This isn’t ethical business, but it is a sadly common practise. Microsoft are more guilty of this behaviour than most, in fact they have refined it into an art form.
• As part of its business strategy, Microsoft combines different products into “bundles”, so that (for example) customers don’t need to obtain a Web browser or a media player before they can start using their new systems. On the face of it, this seems a perfectly reasonable thing to do, if the motive were purely an honourable one. But the fact is that Microsoft do not sell any of these “bundled” products separately, so this isn’t design to promote any of those products. But even more substantively, exactly those same features are available (also for free) from other places (e.g. Firefox), so the assertion that the whole purpose of the “bundles” has anything at all to do with either providing missing functionality or “helping” customers is an obvious lie. In fact the only reason Microsoft bundles these products is to exclude others. They make no profit from it at all, and they need not provide something for free if it can be obtained elsewhere. Bear in mind, that it costs Microsoft a huge amount of money to develop these bundled products, that they then give away for free, even though this is completely unnecessary. So the question is, why?
• In addition to unnecessarily providing free bundles, Microsoft also unnecessarily develops its own competing standards, for such things as networking and documents, even when those other standards are Free, work perfectly well, have been established for years, and precede Microsoft’s questionable reinvention of those standards. Since Microsoft cannot immediately capitalise on something as intangible as a “standard”, again one must ask the question, why?
• Microsoft maintains a network of so-called “partners”. This is not a typical business to business relationship where one firm simply touts another for business, but instead it’s a means of guaranteeing loyalty from those firms by means of contracts, and coercing continued loyalty with the threat that firms will lose competitiveness with other “partners” if they back out of this “arrangement”. This is a common but nonetheless unethical business practice, made all the more unacceptable by the sheer size of Microsoft’s “network”, that essentially forms a global monopoly. Western laws dictate that the mere existence of such monopolies is not a crime, but there must be some demonstrable abuse of that monopoly to warrant any remedial action. It is my contention that the means by which Microsoft maintains this monopoly is inherently unethical, since it has no basis on the quality of their products, but is instead enforced by this threat of failure, a threat that only exists because Microsoft created it in the first place. The result is a business that’s operated like a global racketeering operation, with “partners” too scared to back out, and customers who are left with little or no real choices, as no real competition has any chance of even being established, much less thriving.
• The foundation of Microsoft’s monopoly is its operating system called “Windows” and office productivity suit called “Office”. If it were simply the case that these two products were always the best examples of their kind, and that customers chose this software in preference to competing products, for that reason, then I would see nothing especially unethical about the way in which Microsoft operates its business, although it would still be true that they have a monopoly, because this monopoly would exist for a legitimate reason. But that simply isn’t the case. And this is where we come back to the issues of “bundling” and “standards”. The reason that Microsoft spends a vast amount of resources unnecessarily creating competing (and even inferior) standards, is to establish dependence on those standards. This dependence is then propagated by the distribution of equally unnecessary bundles of free software, which is not designed to benefit the customer, but is just a delivery vehicle for these standards, which Microsoft can ensure exclusive rights to with the use of patents and copyrights. On the other side, there is Microsoft’s network of partners (nearly the whole distribution channel), ensuring that Windows is bundled with nearly every computer ever built, and suddenly the big picture becomes very clear: Microsoft are in fact engaged in racketeering, with all the angles sewn up so tightly that no competition can possibly be established against them. This, of course, is no accident.
• But as if Microsoft’s despicable behaviour were not bad enough to warrant action against them, there’s also their enforcement of this monopoly (against those few brave souls who attempt to breach it) by using more palpably criminal tactics, like smear campaigns and bribery. In fact they would even go so far as to sabotage charities, just to inhibit the spread of alternatives to Windows and Office, lest those who gain experience of these alternatives should learn the truth … that such alternatives are viable, and therefore Microsoft’s software is completely unnecessary. It is essential to Microsoft’s strategy that most people remain ignorant of the viability of alternatives, which is why they also spend vast resources on propaganda - and yes, it certainly is propaganda. Legitimate advertising usually does not employ such devices as shills, corrupt analysts, fake “recommendations”, and sabotage. As I wrote earlier, Microsoft has refined this into an art form, even to the extent of using political and pseudo-scientific methodologies, to secure their vile agenda of domination. They spread lies that Free Software alternatives to their software is “unamerican” and “communist” in nature, they abuse their power to influence government with so-called lobbying (legalised bribery), they plant supporters, whom they euphemistically refer to as “Technology Evangelists” into every walk of society, to infiltrate and uppress any and all dissent against Microsoft, whilst teams of researchers, in a dark basement, study “Perception Management”, to improve the manipulative effectiveness of the “evangelists” agents working in the field. No, this is not a plot from a John le Carré Cold War story - this is the reality of the Microsoft War Machine - their war on our Freedom, their quest for domination, and this sick right-wing extremist agenda of Corporatism - the doctrine of greedy, selfish, cold-hearted megalomaniacs. It may well be that Microsoft are merely a small part of a greater whole, and that the source of this sickness is actually the fundamentally flawed tenets of American society in general. If so, then that is a rather damning indictment of American society, and it may explain its institutionalised narcissism that causes such fear and loathing of anything perceived to be “unamerican”, such as the hysterically McCarthyistic backlash against the “EU scum”, for their “diabolical deeds” of enforcing law and morality.

“Businesses should provide products, then advertise those products honestly, and allow consumers to choose whether or not they like them.”For those who may be having difficulty conceiving of alternative business methods to the above (i.e. the morally deficient thugs) let me give you a clue. Businesses should provide products, then advertise those products honestly, and allow consumers to choose whether or not they like them. Products should sell on their own merit, and not rely on devices such as deception and sabotage to guarantee sales. The former is a Free Market Economy, the latter is a bunch of animals ripping each other to pieces out of greed. Let’s be humans, not animals. Microsoft needs to be caged or put down, and it’s the European Commission’s job to do it, since the DOJ seems to have relinquished the task out of a misguided sense of loyalty (”unamerican”). If aspiring to gangsterism is what it means to be “American”, then I’ll proudly count myself as one of the “EU scum”, a Free Thinker, and a Free Software advocate.

Executive summary for the attention-deficient:

Channel and Partner racketeering (market saturation of Windows).
Lock-in dependencies on proprietary software and standards.
Corporate guerilla terrorism using false advertising and shills.
Thuggish “enforcement” using bribery, blackmail and sabotage.

The four walls of Microsoft’s monopoly.

Footnote: I wonder if Miguel de Icaza will ever be bold enough to actually state his position on these antitrust investigations and rulings against his friends in Redmond. Well that might be a bit tricky, because he’d either have to condemn or condone their criminal behaviour, and thus take one of those dreaded “black or white” positions that he’s so terrified of. Quite a dilemma, but I think the dilemma is not so much in the choice, as in exposing his true nature - officially that is. █

Article by Slated.

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06.13.09

End of Microsoft Money Shows Why Free Software is Better and Standards Are Important

Posted in FOSS, Microsoft, Open XML, Standard at 2:17 pm by Roy Schestowitz

Summary: A lesson in lock-in, courtesy of Microsoft

A few days ago we wrote about Microsoft Money coming to an end (there are many punchlines which properly fit this rare item of news). Other interesting perspectives continue to appear after all that Microsoft PR (and damage control, mostly to do with migration of existing clients). TechDirt writes:

A great example of this is the failure of Microsoft Money. The company has now announced that it’s going to discontinue the product despite years of effort and millions of dollars spent to try to defeat Intuit’s Quicken product.

One particularly good article on the subject comes from Sam Varghese, who explains how this whole situation serves as a reminder that Free software can be one’s savior.

Open source takes no hostages

Have you ever had the experience of creating and storing data in a certain application, only to find that your dependency on a proprietary format means that you have lost all your data?

[...]

With a package like Money, new versions take into account the changing laws that govern small business and personal finances and the headache of managing money disappears.

But what about your data? Is Microsoft going to offer a package that can translate that data into something that could, perhaps, be used by a package like that put out by Intuit?

Unlikely, given that Microsoft once tried to buy Intuit and was only stopped by the US department of justice which “felt strongly that the proposed merger would lead to higher prices and less innovation in the personal finance software market.”

The article as a whole is recommended and so are the comments. Classic arguments about curation, portability, and long-term preservation neatly apply here. Just take OOXML for example. If Microsoft Office is discontinued a few years from now (let’s say due to unsuccessful migration to the Web), how will data encoded in OOXML be accessed 10 years from now? Or 50 years from now? OOXML is proprietary, it is poorly documented, and it contains binary blobs; no application other than Microsoft Office can handle Microsoft’s de facto implementation of something which is only close to ECMA OOXML but drifts further away from it as time goes by (not to mention the crime associated with OOXML). It is designed this way to tighten lock-in.

Free software has been around for ages. It can never be “discontinued” as long as determined users or developers are willing to hack on it. Free software does not depend on any one company for its existence and maintenance. Mozilla/Firefox, for example, outlived the demise of Netscape, using Gecko. █

“People sometimes ask me if it is a sin in the Church of Emacs to use vi. Using a free version of vi is not a sin; it is a penance. So happy hacking.”

–Richard Stallman

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06.12.09

Microsoft and ODF: “Not Just Beer”

Posted in Formats, Microsoft, Novell, Open XML, OpenDocument, Standard at 9:30 am by Roy Schestowitz

Microsoft wants to talk about it over some booze (c/f schmoozing)

Teaser: Guess what conference is attended by pro-Microsoft folks who have been publicly attacking ODF along with friends at Microsoft?

“Not just beer,” called it one of our readers, who made interesting observations about Microsoft’s intrinsic behaviour.

“It could be useful to have some comments on freedom by high-impact political philosophers from various regions and eras. It would put into context what Microsoft folks are doing.”

Samuel Adams once argued, “If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquillity of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.”

“They’re really trying to build out that 5th column,” says our reader.

“My beer reference was a bit on the free-as-in-speech v free-as-in-beer theme, but also left the possibility to comment that maybe Samuel Adams, the beer, is more well known nowadays than its namesake the political philosopher. If you think of the impact his words have on western civilization, it’s quite a big deal.

“My beer reference was a bit on the free-as-in-speech v free-as-in-beer theme, but also left the possibility to comment that maybe Samuel Adams, the beer, is more well known nowadays than its namesake the political philosopher.”
      –Anonymous“If you think about how much communication is electronic, then control of that communication becomes control of the population. A lot of freedoms that generations fought, killed and died for, especially during the 1700’s, have been taken for granted and subsequently abridged under the disguise of ‘technology’. The threat the Microsoft movement poses for all computer-using businesses is obvious enough, bottlenecks and gatekeepers are barriers. However, the same bottlenecks and gatekeepers are also equally or moreso a threat to basic democracy.

“Just look at how ineffective e-mail has become during the last 5 years because of Microsoft Exchange’s failure rate combined with 90% of mail traffic being spam churned out by insecurable Windows machines.”

Looking around at ways by which Microsoft controls means of communication using proprietary document formats, we find that Microsoft keeps busy trying to destroy the new standard, ODF. Dennis E. Hamilton is now speaking to the Microsoft promoter Jesper Lund Stocholm, telling him that “It is not possible to change IPR Mode without shutting down the ODF TC and chartering a new one. Not practical.”

Why is Microsoft even bringing up such a subject? Because it holds software patents that can harm ODF [1, 2, 3, 4] and OASIS takes preventive measures?

Other Microsoft figures who defend Microsoft’s attack on ODF interoperability [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7] are being discussed in the comments here. One comment reads (regarding remarks from Alex Brown):

So in others words, I get from this guy the following;

Microsoft can expend a great deal of energy bastardizing existing standards from any area, such as ISO, or defacto ones, like oh I don’t know, kerberos. Thus making such standards that;

a. works only with their stuff.
b. works partially with the existing standards everyone else uses.

or

c. works with existing standards only if you jump through who knows how many hoops.

Yet, they, Microsoft cannot after expending all the effort on the above, finds it impossible writing to a standard or adhering to its spirit?

Hmm, it surely must be my imagination because there does seem to be an awful lot of ODF bashing lately.

So we have Jesper Lund Stocholm, Alex Brown, and who else is missing from this typical list of ODF offenders? Well, there is a Dutch ODF conference at the moment and it is attended by Microsoft-friendly folks who have been publicly attacking ODF along with prominent friends at Microsoft.

Judging by the heading which says “not just beer”, it was curious to find this.

One of the motors of the anti-ODF whisper campaign still pretends that he belongs in an ODF event. He just wants to go for beers, he claims. We are acutely familiar with this pattern.

People’s memory span is not as short as he wants it to be [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]. He is there to cause trouble and help Microsoft.

Regarding Microsoft’s latest attacks on ODF, GreyGeek writes:

And you say Microsoft doesn’t lie?

Read the article and see the evidence for yourself.

Another person writes about the “New kinder Microsoft”:

Anyone that thinks that Microsoft is a friend of FOSS should pay very careful attention to what they are doing with ODF.

The new Microsoft is a worse version of the old Microsoft.

It ought to be added that Novell is helping Microsoft here. This morning I received the following message:

Le Fri, 12 Jun 2009 10:58:17 +0200,
"Charles-H. Schulz" <charles-h.schulz@laposte.net> a écrit :

> >
> >
> > Hello Michael,
> >
> >
> > Le Tue, 09 Jun 2009 19:11:57 +0200,
> > Per Eriksson <pereriksson@openoffice.org> a écrit :
> >
>> > >
>> > > Hi Michael,
>> > >
>> > > Michael Meeks skrev:
>>> > > > 	Not at all. All our OO.o changes are available under the
>>> > > > terms of the LGPLv3, and we would be more than pleased for Sun to
>>> > > > accept them under the terms of the project license.
>>> > > >
>>> > > > 	Sadly they refuse to do so, without Sun owning the code.
>>> > > > We're eager for a truly independent & representative foundation to
>>> > > > own the code, but not Sun - cf. flamewars ad nauseum on this
>>> > > > topic :-
>> > >
>> > > Thanks for the reply. It wasn't meant to be rude.
> >
> >
> > That's awesome news, Michael; does this mean that the custom filter
> > for OOXML developed by Novell and Microsoft will be under LGPL v3?
> > Did you put the mono stack and Silverlight under LGPL v3?

Novell is on Microsoft’s side. That’s why it helped OOXML, as well. █

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