Anyway, she told me: I want to show my readers who he really is. A few years later, watch how the Slashdot crowd feels about him now that he hides nothing. I personally believe that money and fame from Microsoft messed him up completely.

Microsoft moving away from their proprietary file formats to open, and XML-based (easier to manipulate, produce and consume) file formats.

Except OOXML is not really open, and it is not XML either.

1. The specifications for the old binary file formats were published under the OSP (February of 2008).

4. Microsoft agreed that future versions of OOXML will be covered by the OSP a concern that some people had about future versions of the document.

Major community wins, MS’ own OSP powered by anti GPL.

6. working group was created to look into harmonization of OOXML and ODF, something that many developers involved in office suites have been advocating for a long time.

Great, so we had an ISO standard that was open and multi vendor, but now we have to merge it with some 6000 pages monster that’s tied to MS like heck.

7. Microsoft pledged to support features to support other file formats as native file formats in their office suite:

Followed by a MS quote in which the word “Translator” is all over the place. This said, wtf does this have to do with OOXML standardization?

9. And finally, now that OOXML is an ISO standard, as Patrick Durusau implied there are many winners.

Anyways, I wanted to keep this short and uplifting, this seems like a win for everyone all around.

Preemptive-reply-to-the-above-paragraph: I will not reply/approve any flames, FUD or half-truths.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is the sort of people behind MONO and Novell.