Money battles sanity

Here is a nice new article that covers the quick adoption of OpenDocument format. It is a global-scale transition, which surely can benefit from the network effect monopolists are so intimately familiar with.

South Africa, Netherlands and Korea striding toward ODF

[...]

France is making the strongest move to ODF and its native office suite, OpenOffice. Nearly half a million government employees are being switched to OpenOffice.

France also happens to be moving to GNU/Linux more quickly than a lot of nations.

It has always been interesting to see what happens with OOXML outside English-speaking countries, where Microsoft's (and America's) influence is not so incredibly high. The following new article from Linux Format talks about Jeremey Allison's take on CIFS and OOXML. It's related to a recent debate about cloning, which also involved Mono. Of particular interest are bits like this one:

Over the past few weeks, some strange and rather irregular national positions have come to light. My favourites were Cuba voting "Yes" to the fast-tracking of OOXML, even though Microsoft is prohibited by the US Government from selling any software on the island that might even be able to read and write the new format, and Azerbaijan's "Yes" vote, even though OOXML as defined isn't able to express a Web URL address in Azeri, their official language.

Speaking of Cuba, its submission to ISO was pretty much rejected and had to be sent by mail. Why? Because the ridiculous ISO only accepted submissions in the form of Microsoft Office (Word) format, i.e. .doc. That is the very same proprietary (and anti-standards) format on which the ISO is trying to make a decision.

It would be natural to guess that anyone supporting OOXML is either badly misinformed or has personal gains (money, power, fame etc.) to reap from its acceptance.

Related articles:

• Evidence of Microsoft Influencing OOXML Votes in Nordic States



• Microsoft Memo to Partners in Sweden Surfaces: Vote Yes for OOXML



• The OOXML Problem



• Corrupt countries were more likely to support the OOXML document format



• Microsoft accused of more OOXML standards fiddling



• Microsoft’s secretive standards orgs in Former Yugoslavia