Microsoft keeps looking for others to blame for the fact that software is becoming a commodity.

Reality check: patents are there to encourage the publication of good ideas for the public good. The “carrot” for the “inventor” of the idea is a temporary monopoly on its use. When patents were originally conceived, the world ran much more slowly and mathematical concepts were not supposed to be patentable, so a 17-20 year temporary monopoly on an idea may have been more reasonable at the time.

What these “softies” are now saying is that mathematical concepts (i.e. software, algorithms) are patentable, they deserve a 17-20 year duration on that already questionable patent and that their patent application doesn’t even have to describe the idea they implement in their software well enough for anyone else to use the patent for its intended purpose. To top it off, everyone knows that software development moves quickly and a patent which lasts 17-20 years is a ridiculously long time in that field. Anyone who is using software patents as a basis of a monopoly is essentially making windfall profits from a bad court decision that allowed software patents in the first place.

Software patents are not serving the public good. Instead of resulting in the publication of ideas that otherwise would not have been published, they prevent or restrict the use of ideas that are already well known. Software patents need to be abolished.

you can get the image from the browser cache

Why does FOSS have to build bridges, when its M$ that has to row the boat to us in the frist place.

Look at their bad behaviour with the OOXML and some dumbass still thinks that M$ wants to interoperate with FOSS.

M$ got invited because the decisions are made by the wrong kind of people that crept inside the OSI board and now they are bullying the OSI board into having their own way – just like M$ likes to do…

F*** their interoperability shit. Let them die a slow and painful death.

Edit:

Hmm… I realise now that the image is no longer there and I can’t find a copy. The description hopefully explains what was shown there.

Reminds me of internet explorer 7 implementing tabs, or OS/X Leopard implementing workspaces, but hey, who cares about those fine examples? It is better to blindly follow crazy MS accusations…

.net has been released to ECMA and MS offers it as open stuff , EXCEPT for system.windows.forms.

So, what happens is that all the MS IDES (And SharpDevelop) will almost make it explicit to the user that he must use system.windows.forms, you decide to make an application and it will use windows.forms by default, you got to opt-out and there is no other easy way to have GUI in a .net app without that. And that’s not the only case, MS enforces extensions, like SQL server and other issues.

This is the reason MONO fails to do the only job you would have considered as useful to Linux, let people use important .net apps outside the framework, let me talk from experience that this happens specifically to “Da Vinci” the Bolivian tax client software which was implemented on vb.net and among other things requires you to run a SQLserver client and comes with activeX components… Thus it is impossible to run it on MONO in Linux anyways.

So, that’s how I think it would work in Office, MS will forever advertize OOXML as the ultimate open document standard, let’s just assume you actually were able to implement such 6000 pages long format, and that you give enough confidence on the OSP to implement it, you will still be screwed up since MS is most likely to make office in a way that users will be (unsuspectingly) forced into using the non-covered extensions, since it will be VERY easy to add them to your OOXML document, and VERY hard not to add them.