Bonum Certa Men Certa

OOXML BRM Convenor or OOXML Cheerleader?

Or both

781026_cheerleader
"Moox is da bomb!"

Summary: Spin watch is required as attempts to rewrite past events get noticed

ALEX Brown is pretending that all is fine and dandy with OOXML (he even shows a picture of a smiling face), despite all the OOXML corruption which had people protest out in the streets. André has already replied to end this posturing:

"Over at Rick Jelliffe’s blog Rick has been carrying out something of an exposé of the unfortunate imbalance in the stakeholders represented in the maintenance of ODF at OASIS (something which will become even more acute if Sun is, in the end, snapped-up by IBM). Personally I think Rick is right that it is vitally important to have a good mix of voices at the standardisation table: big vendors, small vendors, altruistic experts, users, government representatives, etc. WG 4 is getting there, but it too has some way to go."

--> Like in your ISO Committee? I see.

"It is disappointing to see the poor rate of progress on meaningful interoperability and harmonisation work. Of course these things are motherhood and apple pie in discussion – but when the time comes to find volunteers to actually help, few hands go up. In my view, the only hope of achieving any meaningful harmonisation work is to get Another Big Vendor interested in backing it, and I know some behind-the-scenes work will be taking place to beat the undergrowth and see if just such a vendor can be found."

--> No idea: "Another Big Vendor". Get me a hint please.

From my perspective the best involvement would emerge from government users who understand that control over document formats is a matter of national security and soverenity. An involvement would usually come from those who have massive free and sustainable capacity, for instance the army, NATO etc. or the foreign office. However, these users would naturally show very little interest in a takeoff of Open XML. Their involvement would guarantee that we move towards an open situation, not an opec one.


The funny thing is that Alex Brown makes it glaringly obvious who he's with [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21]. A couple of days ago he said this to his colleague, Microsoft partner, and friend whom he attributes in his Web site: "@jlundstocholm Now groklaw has bitten on my ODF/OOXML tweet; true to form, omits to quote the ODF bit when reporting it." In case it's not obvious, "jlundstocholm" is Jesper Lund Stocholm [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9], who is lurking in the ODF lists while slagging ODF off and bragging about all the traffic he gets for it from Microsoft employees (he wrote about this in Twitter last week).

Need it be added that Brown is among the minority which chooses Microsoft software for Web hosting?

"If this unethical behaviour by Microsoft was not sufficiently despicable, they did the unthinkable by involving politics in what should have been a technical evaluation of the standard by writing to the head of the Malaysian standards organization and getting its business partners to engage in a negative letter writing campaign to indicate lack of support of ODF in the Malaysian market. Every single negative letter on ODF received by the Malaysian standards organization was written either by Microsoft, or a Microsoft business partner or a Microsoft affiliated organization (Initiative for Software Choice and IASA)."

A Memo to Patrick Durusau

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