Some people never learn...

Summary: Despite a long history of Microsoft formats being proven guarantee of digital obsolescence, Moodle allows itself to become Microsoft prey and a Trojan horse for OOXML in classrooms (for children)

MICROSOFT is ever so desperate to paint .NET/Windows "open", basically characterising its core proprietary lock-in as anything but "closed" so that enough fools (bamboozled by effective, relentless and ubiquitous PR machinery) will consciously become prisoners of Microsoft. Here is some .NET/Windows application being painted "open" by Microsoft, probably serving to mislead only low-hanging fruit who cannot distinguish between cross-platform and Microsoft lock-in being openwashed. We are talking about fools who drank the Kool-Aid (notably Miguel de Icaza, a notorious OOXML proponent), like those who developed Moonlight, which requires Mono, to help Silverlight gain traction and be described as "open" plus "cross-platform" (it's neither).

According to Microsoft boosters, even Microsoft is abandoning Silverlight right now ("Microsoft confirms its new Edge browser won't support Silverlight"). It is even asking others to do the same ("Microsoft: Stop using Microsoft Silverlight. (Everyone else has)"). This is a great example of the high long-term cost of using Microsoft formats (lock-in) to keep one's data. Why would OOXML be any different given that it basically corresponds to just one office suite from one company in rapid decline?

We are disappointed to learn that Moodle is too passive in the face of huge risks to a lot of children. The schools impose software on them (management of courses, grades, etc.) and Microsoft is trying to infiltrate this widely-used software, Moodle. We previously wrote about the Microsoft-connected Blackboard devouring Moodle and Microsoft trying to do the same. Microsoft is trying hard to get children "addicted" (Bill Gates' word) to lock-in with back doors by injecting it into Moodle under the vain pretense of "open source" (there is nothing Open Source about Office or even OOXML). As one Microsoft boosting site put it the other day:

Among the new integrations were Open edX and Office 365, and an update to the open source Moodle integration with Office 365.

For Moodle to allow this to happen is just about as dumb as letting the interface of Moodle be put together by Silverlight. Office 365, notorious for downtimes even when politicians depend on it (which is why we often call it Office 360), is a Trojan horse for OOXML and potentially surveillance too. That would just serve to discredit Moodle in classrooms, making scandals in the media. Moodle's founder read and liked our previous analysis of Microsoft's E.E.E. against Moodle ("Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" is still very much alive as a Microsoft strategy); hopefully he can do something to stop it. School graduates don't deserve to have their private data locked inside Microsoft's vault with format barriers and surveillance which they never consented to (schools make obligatory/finding decisions about these systems). ⬆

“They’ll get sort of addicted, and then we’ll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.”

--Bill Gates