01.21.10
Posted in America, Apple, Europe, Google, Microsoft, Office Suites, Open XML, OpenDocument, OpenOffice, Standard, Wikipedia at 6:01 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Overview encompassing 3 weeks of ODF progress and victories
IT has been a long time since our last ODF update, so here is a long post catching up with key events and developments.
According to Peter Krantz, a seminar on ODF took place at Copenhagen Business School one week ago. Bart Hanssens and others noticed it and Hanssens has added this event to the ODF Web site at XML.org.
Location: Copenhagen, Denmark
Date: 12 Jan 2010 – 09:30 – 15:00
Event Type: Conference
According to published reports in Norwegian and in English, Norwegian Broadcasting moves to OpenOffice.org and ODF. This is great news, but it’s nowhere as big as the news from Munich, which was mostly covered in German (rarely in English). Coverage includes:
There is a lot more about this coming from individual people, with one person saying: “congrats to the #limux team for the complete switch to #odf #linux”
Wikipedia has been updated to reflect on this and the debate carries on. Over in Denmark, a decision on open standards was said to be on the eve of a final decision after the scandals. According to a rough translation from Denmark, Midtjylland is turning to ODF and possibly leaving Microsoft Office. They cite problems with interoperability between Microsoft’s versions of Office. So typical.
Some people still wonder what software is good for ODF support and Sun releases ODF Plugin 3.1 for Microsoft Office, which includes support for ODF 1.2. Microsoft itself supports MSODF, which is not ODF [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7].
There is also freeware and GPL-licensed software that adds ODF support to Microsoft Office.
Drupal’s support of ODF was mentioned here before, but here it is again in some blog posts and in the ODF Web site, sitting there alongside another new page about OfficeReader (also see OffiViewer).
“Jesper Lund Stocholm and his friends from Microsoft are generally still trolling ODF, as usual.”Sander Marechal adds an anonymiser to Officeshots and the Microsoft provocateur Jesper Lund Stocholm trolls such a feature nonetheless.
Jesper Lund Stocholm and his friends from Microsoft are generally still trolling ODF, as usual. It seems as though Alex Brown and his buddies from Microsoft are bound to make another BSI fiasco. The Internet never forgets.
A Microsoft-sponsored ODF seminar (yes, from the company that attacks ODF) is to take place, according to Microsoft’s ODF-hostile trolls. Unlike IBM for example, Microsoft still wishes to eliminate ODF. That’s just its business objective.
Over in Brazil, there is a debate about ODF [OGG]. A rough translation of some coverage says that the “The director of the ODF Alliance Jomar Silva, @Homembit, was a guest at the table discussion on memory International Seminar of the Forum of Brazilian Digital Culture.”
Direct link
Over in the UK, the OSA’s Mark Antony is told that politicians can be believed “they’re sincere when Whitehall is running on Ubuntu & documents on govt. websites are available in ODF…”
“Currently, Microsoft does not properly support ODF and it still treats it like a second-class citizen.”SJVN has his personal interpretation of the impact of the i4i decision [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12]. “Maybe in the aftermath of the i4i decision,” he argues, everyone will “just have to bite the bullet & support ODF.” Currently, Microsoft does not properly support ODF and it still treats it like a second-class citizen. Google too has some catching up to do, based on D. R. Evans, not to mention Apple, which has been helping Microsoft against ODF. As one person put it earlier this month, “ISO’s current defect report for ISO 29500 (OOXML) has 809 pages. That are 71 pages more than the full specification of ODF 1.1! !” Miguel de Icaza helped Microsoft address some of these errors, but since then he has been crowned and named Microsoft MVP [1, 2]. He’s like part of that company.
The UX OpenOffice.org blog marks the beginning of the new year and reports from the UX meeting in Hamburg [1, 2] while ZDNet Germany writes about KOffice 2.1.1 (there’s more about Lotus Symphony). Bart Hanssens writes about ODF content at FOSDEM. He is preparing a talk and he has also uploaded a new draft of ODF 1.1 Interop Profile. His colleague Dennis Hamilton is happy about it.
Our reader The Mad Hatter is making valuable information future-proof right about now:
Open Formats – I’m Moving all Mom’s Poetry to Open Document Format
[...]
Of course if you do want access to Mom’s poetry, you can just go to OpenOffice.Org, and download Open Office at no cost. There’s no reason you can’t have both Microsoft Office and Open Office installed on the same computer.
In summary, even though there are no major ODF events, this international standard continues to develop and be adopted all around the world. █
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01.03.10
Posted in Asia, DRM, Deception, FSF, GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Wikipedia, Windows at 5:56 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Microsoft is sending partners from India to jail and also hiring from the East in order to lower expenses that are wages
THERE is nothing more absurd than a criminal company sending others to prison while managing to stay out of jail or decommissioning. Almost exactly one year ago we wrote about Microsoft sending Chinese businessmen to prison and now this is happening in India:
i. Software company MD arrested for piracy
The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has arrested two persons on Friday, including the managing director of a Delhi-based software company, allegedly for carrying out piracy of Microsoft products.
ii. Partner Cheats on Microsoft
We have been covering Microsoft a lot lately. But for all the wrong reasons these days. First it was the unrest amongst channel partners in the East and North East regarding the arm twisting technique to increase sales. Now it is about the Microsoft Gold Certified partner KK Solutions in Delhi, which the brand caught recently counterfeiting not just the software but also all the certifications.
This is a sure way to drive sellers to GNU/Linux, as Microsoft recently found out in China. In India too, as Microsoft is finding out, this war on so-called ‘piracy’ (it is not piracy*) is having a negative effect.
Related to the above we also have this news:
H1-B Enrollment Up At State Colleges
[..]
As the state lawmakers head back to Olympia this month, we take a look at how one bill passed last year is playing out. The bill granted in–state tuition to foreign professionals and their families. Many of these are H1–B visa holders who work at places like Microsoft and Amazon. Since the law passed, new enrollments among this group have shot up at the UW and at community colleges around the region.
We last mentioned this here or here. █
_____
* When people do not like something, then they tend to assign to that something a bunch of words with very negative connotation. In the case of “piracy”, murder and rape are implied. Even the word “terrorism” is said to have been cheapened by overly extensive and broad use. Today in Slashdot we found: “Novelist Blames Piracy On Open Source Culture”
The direct link says, ‘”With the open-source culture on the Internet, the idea of ownership — of artistic ownership — goes away,” Alexie added. “It terrifies me.”‘ What does that have to do with “open-source”? Nothing. The headline says that “Digital piracy hits the e-book industry.” Open source is wrongly being associated with copyright infringement. Our reader Oiaohm says: “They are looking for someone to blame. [...] Problem is projects like wikibooks is cutting in on there normally easy payday jobs [...] Then projects creating open source text books. So writers of conflicting items with open source find no one prepared to pay for what they have made.” Goblin says: “I don’t think they are trying to blame, I think its merely ignorance and lack of understanding on their part.” Oiaohm says “it’s a mixture” of those two factors. “I.e. open source project cutting into the markets, then normal people who don’t give a rats about copyright doing there normal thing. Copy protection in media has been a losing battle. Expect authors of books to get more hostile to the open source world. Think how may books the Wikipedia has undone. I cannot say fear [of] open source based documentation is groundless.”
As newspapers are already hostile towards Wikipedia and FOSS-like economics, this explanation makes sense. These sources devalue the older ones. A lot of resistance to DRM comes from FSF and the same goes for defense of P2P (where Free software is often obtained, especially GNU/Linux distribution torrents). The RIAA/MPAA (MAFIAA for short) openly complained about the FSF more than once for no justified reason.
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12.09.09
Posted in America, Australia, FOSS, Intellectual Monopoly, Microsoft, Patents, Wikipedia at 6:47 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Peer-To-Patent skepticism, ACTA rears its ugly head with Microsoft as an excuse, the effect on the sight-deficient noted
EARLIER ON we wrote about Peer-To-Patent Australia. It was mentioned critically in this new post and others agree that “this [might] do more harm than good by legitimising “good” software patents…”
More staffing around patents is hardly a solution. Abolishment is the best option.
In the same vein of endorsement through expansion, argues Glyn Moody in relation to the news about “ACTA Secretariat”, “just what we need: *another* global intellectual monopolies body…”
The indispensable Jamie Love has posted a much more convenient version of an earlier leaked “non-paper” from Canada which proposes an ACTA “Council”, i.e. secretariat, that would stand apart from WIPO and the WTO.
We previously wrote about ACTA [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13] and about who/what WIPO represents. Here is WIPO expressing skepticism about Wikipedia, which WIPO must absolutely hate because it weakens monopolies (over information). In general, WIPO views Free software as illegitimate.
But going back to ACTA, Moody shows its connection to Microsoft:
Microsoft Gets in on the ACTA
[...]
Now it looks like Microsoft is joining in:
a common tactic of intellectual property holders is to blur the distinction between counterfeit and pirated goods (and even legal generic goods, in the case of the pharmaceutical industry). Microsoft’s press release exemplifies this, talking about “counterfeit Microsoft software purchased at resellers” and the “black market for pirated software” as if the two were synonymous. In fact, most consumers who obtain pirated goods on the black market realise that they are not original. Whilst Consumers International discourages consumers from using pirated goods, in many countries they have little choice, because originals are either unavailable or are priced far beyond their means.
We wrote about this subject the other day. Microsoft is lying.
Moody adds the observation that “Intellectual Monopolists Scorn the Blind”. This is not the first time we see (or fail to see) it.
This, then, is the reality of “modern” copyright: it fails to serve huge numbers of people, many of whom are already suffering from discrimination in other ways.
Given this situation, various organisations are not unreasonably trying to facilitate access to copyrighted works for those who are visually disabled with a new WIPO treaty that would define basic rights for this group. Who could object to such a humanitarian cause? Well, the publishers, of course.
Last but not least, Moody opines that patent power is drifting over to Asia and he uses this news report as proof.
Asian Tech Firms Buy Up Patents
The days of U.S. technology companies wielding patents to block Asian competitors from the market or collect big royalties may be waning. Ron Epstein, the chief executive and co-founder of IPotential, a San Mateo, Calif.-based patent broker, says South Korean and Taiwanese technology companies have been contacting him to purchase patents. Their goal? To ward off potential intellectual property disputes before conflicts flare.
The trend mirrors a path U.S. companies took several years ago when they first began buying patents defensively, say Epstein, who calls patents a “competitive tool.” “Asian companies have seen the success U.S. companies have had with patent purchasing and are doing it themselves,” he says. He estimates that Asian firms are two to three years behind their Western counterparts in this regard.
A wealth of patents is simply the centralisation of monopolies. Nowhere does it say anything about innovation; it’s just a monopoly, it’s a protection.█
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10.20.09
Posted in Microsoft, Open XML, OpenDocument, Wikipedia at 1:13 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: OOXML BRM convenor getting down to business
Take a look…
And on it goes. █
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10.08.09
Posted in Europe, Microsoft, Open XML, OpenDocument, Standard, Wikipedia at 2:44 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: OpenDocument Format (ODF) suffers more interferences and interruptions from Microsoft and its followers
A FEW days ago, Novell's and Microsoft's role in harming Web standards was mentioned, but Adobe has a similar agenda and Jan Wildeboer from Red Hat warns that “Adobe plans to redefine the Internet with their proprietary stuff.”
Adobe also has PDF for documents, which is not particularly good, but it is far less malicious than Microsoft’s attempt to control documents. As one person has put it, “rtf is as bad as .doc, ideally I’d say use ODF, but MS users will gripe it’s not supported”
“Microsoft insists on making ODF look as though it is proprietary and its lobbyists do the same type of thing in panels they invade.”Microsoft is a company far less ethical than Adobe, simply based on its actions. For instance, Microsoft subverts Wikipedia's entry on ODF such that it advances OOXML. Jomar Silva has just told Tim Bray that “the ODF entry is a mess, and don’t try to fix it, because a jerk named hAl is keeping the mess there !”
That would hardly be news, but hAl is just one among a group that carries on making the article on ODF worse and worse. John Drinkwater has undone yet another hostile and unnecessary change (“Undid revision 317727032 by Cybercobra not a useful change, standard is built upon XML”). This was done in response to a couple of edits from Cybercobra.
Here is Cybercobra removing mentions of “free” and “open” as though they are dirty words. We have seen this before. Microsoft insists on making ODF look as though it is proprietary and its lobbyists do the same type of thing in panels they invade.
ODF has sincere following (not Microsoft partners) and the ODF Toolkit continues to be mentioned a lot, as well as the next Plugfest — an event we previously mentioned in [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 9 10, 11]. Microsoft attended the last Plugfest where it promoted its agenda along with its partners and MVPs.
A pro-Microsoft saboteur wants more access to ODF, probably hoping that people do not remember what he did. Bart Hanssens meanwhile prepares a working draft of an ODF interoperability profile and publishes the following about Xapian.
Xapian is an open source search engine library written in C++ with bindings for C#, Java, PHP and Ruby. It supports the most commonly used document formats, including of course ODF.
What’s the deal with OLE objects, which are Microsoft's way of blocking standard adoption? █
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08.03.09
Posted in FOSS, FUD, Microsoft, Office Suites, OpenDocument, Wikipedia at 3:12 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The Internet wants to be free and so do computer users; Microsoft keeps standing in their way
BACK in 2007, Wikipedia embraced ODF. The software on which it is built, MediaWiki, happens to be used by Boycott Novell and one of Microsoft’s loyal users has just decided to abandon Microsoft Office in favour of MediaWiki. This is not particularly surprising and by all means it is another win for Free software. The following is a sort of eulogy for Microsoft Office.
I chose MediaWiki, the open-source software that powers Wikipedia. It was relatively easy to install on a virtual Linux server. Since everyone has read Wikipedia, the interface was familiar and so our users needed no training. Because Wikipedia managed to efficiently store—at the time of this writing—all human knowledge, speed and scalability weren’t a problem. Finally, the price (free) was acceptable.
[...]
So farewell, Microsoft Word. Don’t feel too bad—you had a long and prosperous run. We had more than twenty years of fun together. You added feature after feature after feature, and I learned how to avoid your crazy style changes whenever I deleted an invisible formatting command. Maybe if you just had “Reveal Codes”… nah, it wouldn’t have mattered. The world simply changed.
The Microsoft-faithful crowd keeps vandalising Wikipedia’s article on ODF, turning it in favour of Microsoft. We last saw this a few days ago, but it just doesn’t stop [1, 2, 3]. Who the heck is “SmackBot“?█
On abuse against ODF at Wikipedia:
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08.01.09
Posted in Apple, FUD, Interoperability, Microsoft, Office Suites, Open XML, OpenDocument, OpenOffice, Standard, Wikipedia, Windows at 6:23 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Microsoft caught failing with OOXML/MSO, Wikipedia mischief noted again, and more wins for OOo and ODF
“E
specially for those brainless ** who maintain that supporting the “de facto standard” means the best interoperability imaginable,” Richard Rasker says and shares this report from The Register, which aligns with what we already know (that the Mac version of Microsoft Office is not compatible with the Windows version).
Microsoft’s recently released Service Pack 2 for Office 2008 for Mac makes it impossible for many users to open Office files created on PCs.
“Yup, sounds like Microsoft to me,” adds Rasker. “And to think that Microsoft Office is actually their only reliable cash cow apart from Windows. One might expect a little better trial and testing before inconveniencing people like this, now mightn’t one?
“And to think that Microsoft Office is actually their only reliable cash cow apart from Windows.”
–Richard Rasker“Anyway, I think I’ll stick with OpenOffice for the foreseeable future. It simply works, no strings attached. Not to mention the fact that those brainless ** from Redmond have failed to produce a viable version of Microsoft Office for Linux for what, the past decade? ‘Proves that they’re just **, deserving every bit of scorn loaded on their sorry backsides.”
The OpenOffice.org team has meanwhile come up with an interface prototype for future versions of the software, which will be released by Oracle. One of their engineers explains:
The prototyping phase, to create a new user interface for OpenOffice.org, has ended last week. See our monthly project Renaissance status presentation for July and try the prototype yourself (Java 6 required). It is not only about Impress, we are working on a UI for the entire OOo. You will be asked to give feedback when closing the prototype. Make use of it!
Microsoft is obviously nervous about OpenOffice.org because it mentions the "P" word. Microsoft is also very nervous about ODF, which it fought like fire (Microsoft still fights against ODF in more subtle ways [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]). Looking at the past 2 days alone, watch how unfamiliar people are stripping off remaining Microsoft criticism from the ODF article in Wikipedia [1, 2]. How familiar a sight. See for example:
The latest malicious edits in Wikipedia are pretending that it doesn’t matter what Microsoft does to Wikipedia and what the ODF Alliance says about Microsoft’s behaviour. It gets whitewashed and John Drinkwater reverses it thusly (by calling it “vandalism”). From the first correction:
Revision as of 19:47, 31 July 2009 (edit) (undo)
Johndrinkwater (talk | contribs)
m (Undid revision 305273577 by 200.156.24.98 (talk) revert vandalism)
From the second correction:
Revision as of 21:30, 31 July 2009 (edit) (undo)
Johndrinkwater (talk | contribs)
m (Undid revision 305237624 by 201.51.5.110 (talk) why remove this?)
In other news, somebody claims that “PSPP now supports output on ODF format!”
No wonder Microsoft is so nervous. █
“It’s a Simple Matter of [Microsoft’s] Commercial Interests!“
–Microsoft on OOXML
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07.01.09
Posted in FUD, Formats, IBM, Microsoft, OpenDocument, Wikipedia at 3:56 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Microsoft carries on smearing ODF in public while pretending to support it
Microsoft is still changing ODF’s history and daemonising ODF using Wikipedia. We wrote about that in:
Rob Weir has already complained about this. It is part of Microsoft’s ongoing attack on ODF [1, 2] — an attack which it is defending by buying journalists lunch (now confirmed to us by the journalist) so that is can carry on breaking ODF interoperability [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7] without public scrutiny.
Weir has just published another rant about Wikipedia, so obviously he keeps track of the continued manipulation by Microsoft — one that we too are seeing because all edits are visible.
I have a mental model of how Wikipedia works and behaves. This may not reflect reality, but it is how I, as an end-user, expect Wikipedia to behave. I think these are reasonable expectations regarding things like standards of proof and balance and that if the real Wikipedia differs substantially from these expectations, then we have a problem.
[...]
Does anyone know whether the above statements have any basis in the aspirations or actual practice of Wikipedia editors and admins? Sadly, my recent reading of some articles suggests that these reasonable expectations are routinely flouted and bear little resemblance to reality.
It’s obvious what Microsoft must be thinking.
“All those haters…”
But to characterise opposition as “anti-Microsoft” is like describing the police as “anti-criminals” and thus “irrational haters”. Microsoft’s behaviour speaks for itself. █
“Their documents display a clear intent to monopolize, to prevent any competition from springing up. And they have used a variety of restrictive practices to prevent that kind of competition.”
–Judge Robert Bork, former US Supreme Court nominee (on Microsoft)
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