I shall flag your comments

That’s OK Roy, you need to do what you think is appropriate. Your readers can look at my posts and decide if they represent stalking or helpful warnings, and whether or not they’re willing to trust someone who readily enlists the aid of liars and hypocrites to promote their website – and more importantly, to engage in attacks on other people here and elsewhere.

The targets of your constant attacks (and I’m referring here to people, not corporations) know who you are, so they know who is smearing them and they can choose to defend themselves if they see fit to do so. But they’re not necessarily aware of members of your club who, having been pushed and laughed out of other communities for disruptive behavior, now run around the internet and do the same with (apparently) your consent while hiding behind who-knows how many false identities. Not to mention the petty insults.

I wonder where you took a wrong turn and went from informing people about your chosen cause, to attacking anyone and everyone who doesn’t march to the same drum you think is correct?

Your red tag is your argument that what I say here is not welcome by your readers, and that’s OK. So far I believe otherwise. I will stop when that ceases to be the case.

And heck, who knows. I might even say something on topic now and then.
Of course the responses I see you have for other people rather lead me to believe that nothing other than gushing praise and robotic consent is welcome here, so I’m not sure what the point of that would be. Cop-outs like “oh you must work for Microsoft” or insulting attacks and smears from your nymshifter friends and collaborators are enough proof of that.

But this is your blog, and that’s your problem. What your collaborators and boosters do in your name elsewhere is everybody’s problem, unfortunately.

Note: writer of this comment adds absolutely nothing but stalking and personal attacks against readers, as documented here.

In my (humble) opinion this person should not be taken seriously. Neither should I…

That sums it up. Your comments were never on topic and I shall flag your comments for being just personal attacks.

Roy never said anything about problems with the free software definition, or that the GPL practically is the free software definition. He simply said “poisonware” was not mutually exclusive to free software. This does not suggest a problem with initial definition i.e. there is some loophole in the definition that needs to be addressed, no different than an effeminate man does not necessarily mean a problem in the biological definition of a male.

The intent was that poisonware itself is a corruption of free software – something that masquerades under the ideals, or seems to adhere to the ideals, when in actuality is intended as a way to lure users/developers to another platform. Similar in concept to a trojan horse, or more fitting, a delicious but poisoned cake.

And before anyone starts, this is not a statement in support of either side – just clearing a misunderstanding that seemed to happen at the beginning of the comments.

In my (humble) opinion this person should not be taken seriously. Neither should I, but then I’m not pretending to be engaged in the discussion at hand.

Note: writer of this comment adds absolutely nothing but stalking and personal attacks against readers, as documented here.

OOXML is both a marketing and technical failure. It is a technical failure by design, as was M$’s previous binary formats. OOXML allows binary inclusions and inherits all of the contradictions of multiple versions of M$ Office without sufficient instructions to resolve them. At its worst, it includes references to the printed output from older versions of Word as such without actual measurements of print or instructions that make a difference, such as printer and fonts used. This is why ISO’s OOXML specification is more than 7,000 pages long and completely unworkable. No version of it will ever work better than Word did, and that’s the point, M$ Word will be the defacto standard for people dumb enough to accept OOXML. The problem for M$ is that people are not so stupid and are not using OOXML, even if they use M$ Office. Free software users are even less likely to use it.

What’s more important than that for free software users is that parts of OOXML are under M$’s patent threat. While recent US decisions are undoing this threat, the mechanism of patent enforcement are still strong enough to cause considerable damage to distributions that use OOXML. Until software patents are abolished, they can still be used to halt distribution and cost “unlicensed” distributions plenty of money.

These things are obvious when you think about them. You guys can split hairs about who’s doing what, OOXML will never be workable. The details, including the rather mindless heckling seen in 100+ comments above, all support the general contention: M$ is evil and everything from should be avoided. If M$ wanted to “interoperate” they would GPL their code and use reasonable standards instead of filling the world with bullshit.

The reality is, though, that many people are using the format – knowingly or not.

In order to get off the format, you have to be able to convert documents in it.

Note: comment has been flagged for arriving from an incarnation of a known (eet), pseudonymous, forever-nymshifting, abusive Internet troll that posts from open proxies and relays around the world.

It would be extremely handy if the office suites handled saving in that format as well, but for now isn’t a requirement (and may never become a requirement, depending on how MS Office w/ ODF support plays out). So long as there exists a file format that can be universally read/written, read-only support for OOXML may be good enough. Currently that universal format is the old .doc format, but maybe it will become ODF.

Half the time when I ask for a word document, I get docx these days. Luckily I can read them with OOo. When I make my changes and send it back, I can usually get away with sneakily re-saving as .doc and therefor “trick” them into continuing further back-and-forths using the old binary .doc format.

In the past I’ve tried asking people who sent docx to save as the old .doc format instead, but that generally ended up as an exercise in futility so have given up.

Google finds three results for “resend in binary”, and one for s/in/as/.

As even users of Office say, resend as binary.

Nah, I’ve never heard them say that. They were astounded when I would tell them that I couldn’t open their ‘Word document’ and probably considered us a bit backward.

Note: comment has been flagged for arriving from an incarnation of a known (eet), pseudonymous, forever-nymshifting, abusive Internet troll that posts from open proxies and relays around the world.

Remember, users don’t say “.doc file” or “Office 2003 XML”, etc. They say “Word document”: to them, it’s all the same.

ODF doesn’t stand a chance – believe me, not a chance – if the key ODF apps are not compatible with the market leader.

They are. They typically support the binary formats.

ActiveX is optional

Tell this to people whose intranet/bank requires it.

ODF doesn’t stand a chance – believe me, not a chance – if the key ODF apps are not compatible with the market leader.