Do I trust leaving my cat alone with a fish I’m defrosting?

What’s Microsoft trying to protect? An astronomical rate of profit…even beyond the oil companies.

http://leftylabourtech.blogspot.com

“Look mommy. They are not so bad. They have sent our town a giant wooden horse as a gift.”

“We’re disheartened because Microsoft helped W3C develop the very standards that they’ve failed to implement in their browser. We’re also dismayed to see Microsoft continue adding proprietary extensions to these standards when support for the essentials remains unfinished.”

–George Olsen, Web Standards Project

Then we had Microsoft licenses in OSI whilst Bill Gates is openly bashing the GPL and Ballmer screams for blood.

Do I trust them? I judge by history. So should we generally trust them? Like we trust a camel in our tent… or Microsoft’s elephant in the room.

http://www.openmalaysiablog.com/2008/03/the-elephant-in.html

Absolutely disgusting. Despicable. 2008. Nothing has changed.

“Look mommy. They are not so bad. They have sent our town a giant wooden horse as a gift.”

Alex H, I do believe you hit the big plan. But how do expect they are going to help develop ODF?

I think it’s an important step, but I will only believe it when I see it.

Microsoft are putting ODF into Office 2007 at their next available opportunity. That’s huge.

Microsoft are joining OASIS’s office committee, and are going to participate in all the relevant OOXML, ODF and PDF committees at ISO. That’s also huge.

This is the end of ODF vs. OOXML and the beginning of ODF+OOXML.

I was wondering how you’d manage to spin a negative light on this

I was wondering how you’d manage to spin a positive light on this.

I’ve just posted a follow-up about a minute ago:

http://boycottnovell.com/2008/05/22/microsoft-odf-skeptics/

I suppose in “you” the addressee was to a pluralised entity. We’re not alone here, although I personally arrived at this conclusion /before/ reading anything from any of the critics.

First, it’s pretty clear they’ve been working on this a while – you can see screen shots on Doug Maugh’s site – no matter how “simple” ODF is, it takes a while to implement. For them to ship this in 9 months means that they have to be looking at being feature complete before the end of this year.

Second, you missed the really huge news! Office’s support of ODF is great, but the big story is that Microsoft are joining the ODF committee at OASIS. They’re going to be helping develop ODF.

After ODF 1.2 is done, I think we’ll begin to see rapid alignment between the two formats.

Just published in The Register:

Don’t get too excited by this outbreak of peace. SP2 isn’t due until the first half of 2009, meaning you’ve got a good year before you can save an Office 2007 document using ODF. Ahead of that lies SP1, due at the beginning of June.

There is also no word on if, or when, SPs will be delivered that bring ODF and PDF to the vast install base of customers and developers working with older versions of Office.

Accordingly, the ODF Alliance, the group of vendors and national bodies leading ODF, has warned against premature celebrations saying we should wait and see what Microsoft actually delivers in SP2. ODF Alliance managing director Marino Marcich said the proof of Microsoft’s commitment to openness would be whether ODF support is on a par with Open XML.

He pointed to Microsoft’s promise two years ago to support ODF, when it backed an existing BSD project for an Open XML Translator. The project, to deliver an Office add-on to save documents in ODF, is also due in the first half of 2009. That software has not been finished, and it’s not clear whether today’s announcement for support will use the translator.

“Until Microsoft enables Office users to create and save in ODF by default as easily and fully as in Microsoft’s own formats, governments will continue to adopt a ‘buyer beware’ attitude,” Marcich said in a statement.

Significantly, Microsoft is not quite ready to give up on its ODF rival, Open XML, that it’s been busy railroading through standards bodies across the globe.

So my instincts were possibly right. The excitement from Updegrove seems premature.

“what have we done? we’ve taken open xml from Microsoft… worked on the translation engines of that with ODF, we’ve now built open xml support into… a version of openoffice, so now it will open up the latest Microsoft Office default document standard.

“We’re going to work very very closely, we have a roadmap in place for ODF translators… Open XML translators to ODF… we start releasing them in January, so there’ll be one for Word, one for Excel, one for Powerpoint, etc for the.. for the OpenOffice product,”

[..]

“So, essentially, you’ll be able to open up, all up to office 97 documents that come with Microsoft with office. and in turn, we are also working with Microsoft to ensure that they put native ODF support within Microsoft office. Ok, that’s key the fact that it will now open up our documents that we natively store in OpenOffice inside there.”

He said this in 2006. Wow.

By the way, Shane, I’ve figured out what was causing some of the server issues after the host had apparently brought down and soon up again the Web site (a matter of minutes, but maybe some changes to Apache/cPanel were made). There’s some memory limit that doesn’t permit sitemaps to be generated unless we limit them (size leads to heavy server load). This leads to errors when attempts are now to made to regenerate the sitemap (e.g. when publishing new items), so maybe it’s worth inquiring about. I wouldn’t mess about with server settings because of the warnings given at the bottom of this page which explains a common issue:

http://wordpress.org/support/topic/171865

For the time being, posts are excluded from the sitemap. Technical issues as hurdles. It’s a shame really.

Stafford Masie, once again you have been proven correct, even though I have ridden you from the moment you uttered those words.

Honestly, if you go back through those presentation and q&a transcripts, it’s kinda spooky how right he has been.

It’s also kinda scary, how right he has been.

Stafford Masie, once again you have been proven correct, even though I have ridden you from the moment you uttered .

Honestly, if you go back through those presentation and q&a transcripts, it’s kinda spooky how right he has been.

It’s also kinda scary, how right he has been.