The Open Forum Europe (OFE) event was re-scheduled to accommodate for this event. At 7pm, the OFE event started, and it was an excellent discussion by 4 luminaries of the Open Standards world; Bob Sutor (IBM), HÃ¥kon Lie (Opera), Andy Updegrove (StandardsConsortium.org) and Vint Cerf (father of the internet, and now Google). They all stressed the importance of true Open Standards (as some are more open than others), and how it will become more and more relevant as we move our lives online. Vint had the best line on this:

"Merely publishing your specification doesn't make it an open standard. It needs open participation to become an open standard and full implementation commitment by multiple independent vendors"

"What I'd love to see is Microsoft adopt the already existing ISO standard," Zemlin says, referring to the OpenDocument Format (ODF) backed by Google and others. "It's akin to Microsoft going to the United States Congress and proposing an alternative bumper heights."

Microsoft's problem isn't technical or financial or a matter of skill. It's attitudinal. Microsoft, from what I see, doesn't want to be interoperable with the GPL, their principal competition, or with ODF unless someone forces them. And that's not a problem we can fix for them. If they desired true interoperability, not customer lock in, they'd embrace ODF and work out one standard we could all use, no matter what operating system we use. Think about the obvious goal of Microsoft's current patent strategy. It's the same song, to me. The GPL is being squeezed out, if Microsoft gets its way, and we all get squeezed for money whether we use Microsoft software or not.

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I'm tired of Microsoft's dirty tricks too, actually. Why can't Microsoft compete fairly, with decency? What place do smears have in a standards process? Did you read the News Picks item by Tim Bray on what Microsoft did to him and his wife years ago because he dared to support Netscape?