06.17.11
Posted in FUD, Microsoft, Open XML, OpenDocument, Security, Windows at 4:26 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The company which made viruses so abundant (and whose operating system is insecure by design) is using excuses and tricks to daemonise WebGL
WE HAVE seen it all before. Whether it was the case of not supporting ODF or even something like Ogg, Microsoft never blamed competitive reasons; it’s just not good for PR and the whole antitrust karma too would be impacted. See how Microsoft used security FUD to promote OOXML [1, 2]. It sure is amusing when Microsoft spinner Mr. Bright excuses Microsoft for avoiding WebGL by citing its talking points (headline says “Microsoft: no way to support WebGL and meet our security needs”). Truth be told, there is clearly more to it considering what’s done with Silverlight (hardware acceleration and Web integration, even with proprietary software).
For Microsoft it is not unusual to snub new standards and create its own proprietary extensions that require Windows with IE. It is no secret that even Microsoft’s Web developers write hacks especially for IE6 (and they detest IE for this reason, based on comments found in page source). Watch Microsoft’s booster Bott spotting a new “Microsoft security versus Microsoft Web” gaffe. Of course he is spinning this. It’s his job.
Microsoft makes shoddy Web products because it wants to turn the Web into a sandbox of lock-in, not interoperability. Instructions for this come from the top. █
“In one piece of mail people were suggesting that Office had to work equally well with all browsers and that we shouldn’t force Office users to use our browser. This Is wrong and I wanted to correct this.
“Another suggestion In this mail was that we can’t make our own unilateral extensions to HTML I was going to say this was wrong and correct this also.”
–Bill Gates [PDF]
Permalink
Send this to a friend
06.02.11
Posted in Bill Gates, IBM, Microsoft, Office Suites, OpenDocument, OpenOffice, Patents at 1:54 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: A look back at how Microsoft distorted the market of office suites and a candid suggestion for IBM to open up on the real issues, not the minor details
THE “RUTHLESS” Bill Gates is nowadays buying newspapers to call himself something else and distract from his evil side, rewriting history to a sufficient extent so that people will forget his poisonous legacy that everyone suffers from, to this date. It is called reputation laundering. Today we would like to go back and show people the real Bill Gates. Later this month we hope to get a helping hand from another editor who can help show some of today’s offences from Gates (but that’ll be left aside for now as it is partly off topic).
“On another occasion Gates showed not only his hatred of standards and interoperability but also his love of patents.”So yesterday we wrote about how IBM becomes a key player in ODF. IBM and Microsoft are rivals as much as Apple and Microsoft are rivals. They actually collaborate in some areas where it is beneficial to both companies (not necessarily to the externalities). Microsoft, which is is run by sociopaths, has quite a history of copying and also breaking Lotus. We showed this using Comes vs Microsoft court exhibits. A Techrights informant has just reminded us that, in Comes vs Microsoft, “PXE 3078 has Lotus working for interoperability and MS working against it.” We covered this several years ago. Bill Gates said that giving out the Office 2000 formats to competitors seems crazy and this type of remark occurred later too. On another occasion Gates showed not only his hatred of standards and interoperability but also his love of patents. On several occasions he tried to use software patents against OpenOffice.org, even resorting to patent blackmail against Sun. A lot of publications speak of the OpenOffice.org news in the context which excepts and excludes patents (see examples at the bottom of this post). This is a mistake. To give just one example of a typical interpretation of this announcement:
Continuing what it likes to describe as its “long-standing commitment to open source,” IBM has this week confirmed that it will now take an active role in the new OpenOffice.org code base submitted to The Apache Software Foundation Incubator.
IBM and open source you say? Should that be unusual?
This does not tell the whole story. Remember what we wrote about the Apache licence some weeks ago (this led to FUD). Remember who likes this type of licence, which Microsoft proponents sometimes champion (and Microsoft now gives money to the ASF too). As we stated yesterday, too much would have been written about the news and we wish not to bore with repetition. But what we shall say is that Microsoft is vehemently opposing interoperability (the problem is at the core, including Bill Gates), so we must defend ODF, even if it means tolerating IBM. But IBM should not be treated as our friend here (nor should The Document Foundation, which has some residues from Novell). After many observations were being made in our IRC channels we have reached the conclusion which some of us accept. It is possible that IBM, which cross-licenses (software patents) with Microsoft, can now take its proprietary version of OpenOffice.org (Lotus Symphony) and further extend it legally without contributing back the changes. That’s what an Apache licence will do assuming that the passage of copyrights to Apache works as IBM hoped. This whole thing shows the dangers of copyright assignment agreements (pay attention, Canonical) and if the LGPLv3 is abandoned as Bradley from the FSF suspects [3], then it will be possible for IBM to make Symphony the only patents-’covered’ derivative of OpenOffice.org (indemnification for example). The big vendors are playing evil games to increase their own power and ODF gets wedged somewhere in the middle. IBM could have joined hands with LibreOffice and its umbrella organisation. It hasn’t done so yet. There were even snide remarks from IBM. One person who urged IBM’s most relevant Vice President in this area claimed that the latter has not approved his comment, although after some discussion and an E-mail from this vice president we learned that he was too busy (which is probably true and not an excuse/afterthought). Anyway, IBM needs to clarify two things now: 1) will it join LibreOffice? 2) Where does it stand on the subject of licensing/copyrights and patents? IBM is generally a silent company after the antitrust complications, so it has communications problems (even when it communicates it is trying to hide the communication). █
References:
-
The Document Foundation would welcome the reuniting of the OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice projects into a single community of equals in the wake of the departure of Oracle. The step Oracle has taken today was no doubt taken in good faith, but does not appear to directly achieve this goal. The Apache community, which we respect enormously, has very different expectations and norms – licensing, membership and more – to the existing OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice projects. We regret the missed opportunity but are committed to working with all active community members to devise the best possible future for LibreOffice and OpenOffice.org.
-
IBM’s Kevin Cavanaugh, VP of Collaboration Solutions., which lobbied for Oracle to spin OpenOffice off after it became clear that Oracle wasn’t going to put much, if any, resources into OpenOffice, said in a statement, “IBM welcomes Oracle’s contribution of OpenOffice software to the Apache Software Foundation. We look forward to engaging with other community members to advance the technology beginning with our strong support of the incubation process for OpenOffice at Apache.”
-
I was disturbed today to read that Oracle will seek to relicense all OpenOffice code under the Apache-2.0 license and move OpenOffice into the Apache Software Foundation.
I’ve written recently about how among the permissive licenses, my favorite is clearly the Apache License 2.0. However, I think that one should switch from a copyleft license to a permissive one only in rare circumstances and with the greatest of care.
Obviously, in this case, I oppose Oracle’s relicense of OpenOffice.org under Apache-License-2.0. It is probably obvious why I feel that way, but I shall explain nonetheless, just in case. I’m going to mostly ignore the motives for doing so, which I think are obvious: Oracle (and IBM, who are quoted in support of this move) for their own reasons don’t like The Document Foundation fork (LibreOffice) of OpenOffice.org. This is a last-ditch effort by IBM and Oracle to thwart the progress of that fork, which has been reported as quite successful and many distributions have begun to adopt LibreOffice. (Even non-software sites sites like Metafilter have users discussing changing to LibreOffice .)
-
-
There is an entirely different class of CAAs where you give a company full right to your code, however. Sun (and later Oracle) demanded this for contributions to OpenOffice.org. They need this to be able to incorporate the contributions into non-free versions of OpenOffice like StarOffice or IBM’s Lotus Suite. So in essence, you have to give them the right to sell non-free versions of your code or you can’t contribute. As far as I’m concerned, this is clearly not a good use of CAAs!
-
I guess Oracle thought the same thing. They ignored OpenOffice and its contributors after buying Sun. Sure they killed OpenSolaris first. It was only a matter of time before they ankled OpenOffice.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
06.01.11
Posted in IBM, OpenDocument, OpenOffice, Standard at 11:21 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Photo by Dan Farber
Summary: OpenOffice.org is moving to Apache, which helps IBM after a short moment of uncertainty and doubt
PR blunders aside (IBM PR telling me, “if you blog about the end of this case, none of this information came from IBM, okay? Cheers…”), it has just been announced that, as SJVN told us all last night, OpenOffice.org is going to Apache and the IBM folks are quick to issue remarks about it, led by Brill, Weir, and Sutor. Weir says that:
Oracle has followed through with their earlier promise to “move OpenOffice.org to a purely community-based open source project.” OpenOffice is moving to Apache.
Prior to that Weir also said: “Disappointing to see so-called open source proponents desperately trying to squash an open source project. It must be Tuesday.” It is not clear if he was referring to the petition to Oracle. Perhaps he should clarify his statements, e.g. with a link.
Remember how IBM reacted after Oracle had sued Google. The issues of patents will be discussed here later. IBM almost bought Sun.
Sutor writes:
It’s been an interesting road to get to this point over the decades, with well and not-so-well publicized twists and turns, but I’m glad we got here.
We’ll have more about this shortly, hopefully something unique (although the Internet will be flooded by pundits). Let us remember that OpenOffice.org is Free software and so is LibreOffice. There is a lot to be said now which probably will be said by every FOSS/Linux site.
In defence of IBM, the company is bigger than Microsoft, but it is not fundamentally against Free software. Scale is not the problem (SCO, for example, was always quite small). Prepare for a lot of FUD from the Microsoft camp, which harbours the #1 cash cow. █
Permalink
Send this to a friend
04.24.11
Posted in Microsoft, Open XML, OpenDocument, Standard at 7:20 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
“A stacked panel, on the other hand, is like a stacked deck: it is packed with people who, on the face of things, should be neutral, but who are in fact strong supporters of our technology. The key to stacking a panel is being able to choose the moderator. Most conference organizers allow the moderator to select die panel, so if you can pick the moderator, you win.”
–Microsoft, internal document [PDF]
Summary: A key participator in the OOXML fiasco mocks an attempt to establish real standards
MICROSOFT zealots are quite the bunch. Those zealots love to characterise freedom lovers as what they themselves are, carefully using stereotypes to portray appreciators of rights, standards and transparency as the “bad guys”. We saw many examples of that last week in ZDNet and days ago we got a reminder when we saw Microsoft's "fox" speaking utter rubbish again. Alex Brown [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21] wants to be seen as a professional, but he keeps dodging the questions that matter. Moreover, rather than apologise for helping a corrupt process be corrupt (knowing all sorts of things which turned out to be true later, including patent traps), he carries on moaning and playing dumb. What does it say about him? With UK acceptance of ODF he must be rather bitter. After all, his reputation was burned like an effigy after all he had sacrificed everything for his beloved OOXML. Strong language is all he can descend to now, writing phrases like: “Faced with such clueless fuckwittery it’s tempting simply to ask: what’s the point?” The context is “UK Open Standards”.
Andy Updegrove has responded to this one:
Presumably, being involved in standards activities that are highly relevant to the consulting and implementation business of Alex’s firm, Griffin Brown, has no impact on its fortunes at all. And engaging in some other type of community service – say, volunteering at a homeless shelter, or becoming a Boy Scout leader – would avoid all that tedious travel to the excessively dreary locations where SC 34 (the format standard working group) insists on holding its meetings. Places like Tokyo, Stockholm, Paris, Copenhagen, and Prague.
[...]
The problem, it appears, is that Alex thinks that only those that participate in working groups like SC 34 are competent to judge what should be in a standard, or which among competing standards might be superior. Never mind, of course, that legions of formal standards have never been widely adopted at all, or that consortium standards are frequently adopted over formal standards. But forget that. Those who aren’t inside the formal standards process just don’t get what standards are really and truly all about, so why don’t all you ignorant sods just bugger off?
If the name Alex Brown rings a bell, don’t be surprised. Alex was the convenor of the one week OOXML Ballot Resolution Meeting held in 2008 – you know, the one that thought that a one week meeting was an intelligent way to resolve over 1,000 comments on an over 6,000 page specification in order to formalize an open standard. During that meeting, Alex made multiple decisions that were later condemned by many. Four countries filed formal appeals. Alex remains serene about that meeting, the decisions made, and the outcome.
Standards, you see, are not to be questioned by those that are expected to use them. They are to be accepted with the deference to which their developers are entitled. We, who are increasingly utterly dependent on what standards allow us to do, or not do, are never, ever to question the judgment of those that create these precious gifts.
Our role is to take what we’re given, and do what we’re told. Anything else would be “clueless fuckwittery.”
My God, Alex. Where is there an end of it?
“Do take a look,” remarks Groklaw, “and if you are in the UK, you might let the government know what standards are important to you. If you are not one for surveys, it says you can alternatively email cto at cabinet-office.x.gsi.gov.uk” █
Permalink
Send this to a friend
04.18.11
Posted in Asia, Courtroom, Microsoft, Open XML, OpenDocument, Patents at 2:14 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: OpenDocument Format (ODF) keeps spreading while OOXML shows patent complications
Somebody called ruslinux (in Twitter) writes: “Berita baik untuk semua pengguna program perkantoran, pemerintah akui OpenDocument Format sbg standar nasioal dg No. SNI ISO/IEC 26300:2011″
“Which I take to mean that ODF now approved as a national standard in Indonesia,” says Rob Weir from IBM.
We wrote about this (or something similar) last year after we explained what Microsoft had been doing in Indonesia. This helped in providing some background.
The i4i case is back in the news, showing OOXML’s legal problems. For those who cannot recall, Microsoft and its friends (like Alex Brown) lied about the patent status of OOXML in order to push it past ISO. It’s a good thing that nations do not adopt OOXML. The case is still ongoing (many appeals) and OOXML suffers as a result. In another case, Microsoft is appealing a decision regarding its abusive behaviour which Pogson explains as follows:
Duh… It’s not “double recovery”. The conspirators conspired to set up their criminal organization that way. Make them pay for it. That’s a judgment to be made in penalty phase, what portion of the overcharging was due to M$. Pathetic… criminals protected by the legal system.
When consumers complain they are told the competition does not protect them but businesses in competition. When businesses sue, they are kicked out because they did not buy direct from M$.
That’s just Microsoft bending the law. █
Permalink
Send this to a friend
03.01.11
Posted in Deception, Free/Libre Software, Google, Microsoft, Open XML, OpenDocument at 2:49 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Microsoft uses dirty old tactics of spin, characterising itself as pro-choice and software freedom as against choice
Luke Hopewell from ZDNet.com.au helps Microsoft spread lots more propaganda this week (pushed through ZDNet, as usual). Microsoft Australia’s CTO is just given the platform to spout out a whole lot of nonsense such as:
“We believe in choice, and things should stand or fall by their own merits. Locking something in through denying interoperability is something that doesn’t promote that and that’s something we don’t support,” Stone said.
To lie with a straight face takes great courage. Suddenly they try to paint software freedom as “denying” “choice”. The hypocrisy knows no bounds and the ‘choice’ lie is a subject we explained here before [1, 2]. Using gymnastics in logic, Microsoft tries to make it seem like policies that favour free/open source software are impeding ‘choice’, just like Microsoft tried to cast the proprietary (Microsoft-only) OOXML as ‘choice’, where basically it relied on the confusion between standards and applications (it is desirable to have one standard with many applications implementing it, otherwise people cannot collaborate).
Over at IDG, the pro-Microsoft Nancy Gohring helps Microsoft spread ODF FUD [1, 2] right now:
Microsoft is also complaining about what it calls a lack of full support for the OpenDocument Format in Google Docs, which is used at least informally by some government agencies. When Google Docs renders documents created in ODF, it alters them by, for example, changing page numbers, said Curt Kolcun, vice president of Microsoft’s U.S. Public Sector group. Microsoft was subjected to intense pressure around the globe by government agencies that insisted it support the open document standards.
Watch how history is softened over time. When Gohring says “subjected to intense pressure” she actually refers to Microsoft corrupting (e.g. bribing), deceiving, buying votes, and bullying critics. And what for? To call its proprietary, monopolistic application “a standard” and then force governments (at taxpayers’ expense) to keep buying it, which in turn forces citizens to buy it (network effect). How malicious.
As for Google Docs, it’s not an example of good ODF support; as Carlo Piana recently put it, it turned his spreadsheet into spread s***. It’s a proprietary application, so it does not matter much and articles that paint it as “Google vs Microsoft” (rather than FOSS versus Office) are no better than those who talk about Mac vs PC/Apple vs Microsoft. It is a bogus, diversionary dilemma which excludes real contenders. █
Permalink
Send this to a friend
02.24.11
Posted in Microsoft, Open XML, OpenDocument, Standard at 5:34 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: OOXML is shown to be broken just as the fifth ODF plugfest starts in Maidenhead town hall (UK)
SEVERAL years after Microsoft’s push for OOXML really began it still remains rather extinct. People make a mental note which says that .docx is a format people dislike and are often unable to open. Search engines too can provide some evidence of the scarcity of OOXML on the Web. Technical people know that OOXML such a bad, poorly-constructed specification, whereas computer users who are less technical usually view it as alien and unfamiliar (even if Microsoft assigns the same icons to OOXML). Rob Weir highlights the important findings about OOXML breaking apart and causing great trouble:
Microsoft’s controversial Office Open XML format, now officially called just Open XML*, has an embarrassing bug in its Office 2010 and/or Office 2007 implementation, as reported by Dennis O’Reilly on Cnet.
In a nutshell: if you save a document from Word 2010 using the default .docx format, and send it to a user with Word 2007 but who has a different default printer driver, then a few seemingly random spaces may get dropped from between words or sentences when it is opened on the other machine. When saved in Word 2007, the spaces remain missing if the document is re-opened in Word 2010.
Even CNET (CBS) has just covered it:
Some readers took exception when I stated in a post from last month on future-proofing your data archive that Microsoft’s proprietary Office file formats may not stand the test of time. Well, compatibility problems have already surfaced between the two most recent releases of MS Word.
Several people report spaces being dropped randomly from documents created in Word 2010 when the files are opened in Word 2007 on another machine. (A post on the Microsoft Answers forum explains the problem in more detail.)
So there we have another lesson regarding the failures of OOXML. Support for ODF, on the other hand, keeps expanding. Incidentally, the UK-based ODF plugfest starts today. It started 2 hours ago. █
Permalink
Send this to a friend
02.07.11
Posted in Deception, Europe, Free/Libre Software, Microsoft, Novell, Open XML, OpenDocument at 10:10 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Racing to block the competition using Big Tobacco-esque tactics…
Summary: Headsup about Microsoft’s latest attempts to hijack the voice of its opposition so as to ensure the competition does not get to speak and receive the priority it deserves
Reform of the patent systems is on everybody’s lips, but each party means something else when it says “reform”. Basically, many corporations want the patent systems to become more friendly towards them (Microsoft is lobbying on the matter right now [1, 2]) and mere people are hardly taking part in this debate, which includes the Patent Reform Act of 2011 [1, 2, 3] (put forth by senators who are being lobbied by corporations).
Even though Google starts moving in the right direction (more seriously challenging software patents while, just like Red Hat, adding some software patents to its own stash, allegedly for defensive purposes), the Larry Page-led company is trying to amass new patents in bulk, unlike Red Hat whose role is quite unique. Basically, Google is still too shy to say that it wants software patents nuked (the shareholders might not understand such a stance), whereas Red Hat sends a less ambiguous message.
Meanwhile, there is a coalition of companies which defend patent monopolies using the “fair” spin (like the “F” in FRAND). The new article “Patent Reform Act 2011: Winners and Losers” sheds some light on it, as well as on other things:
Two other supporters of the bill are Microsoft and IBM but a group representing fourteen technology companies that include some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley — such as Apple, Google, Cisco, Intel and Symantec issued a statement Thursday saying that the senate judiciary bill still needs a lot of work. These companies are all part of a group called the Coalition for Patent Fairness which is a diverse group of companies and industry associations dedicated to enhancing U.S. innovation, job creation, and competitiveness in the global market by modernizing and strengthening our nation’s patent system. Coalition for Patent Fairness members include Adobe, Apple, Autodesk, Cisco, Dell, Google, Intel, Intuit, Micron, Oracle, RIM, SAP, Symantec, Verizon.
Having recently embedded itself inside the FOSS community (by paying FOSDEM organisers for example), Microsoft is now trying to subvert and water down public policies like its front group ACT does. Following this duo’s subversion of EIFv2 [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6], they once again pretend to be FOSS or SMB representatives as amid OOXML outage in Australia [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6] Gary Gray makes commitments to “open source”. See this new report titled “Microsoft seeks inclusion after open source mandate”:
Software giant welcomes AGIMO’s open source policy.
Microsoft has called for the Australian Government’s agencies to engage with “all forms” of software development communities – be they proprietary or open source – in response to official moves in Canberra to embrace open source alternatives.
In a letter to Special Minister of State Gary Gray released on Monday, the software giant welcomed the Federal Government’s newly revised open source policy, which required agencies to consider open source in IT procurements.
[...]
Microsoft also offered to contribute to the development of a Federal Guide to Open Source Software, noting that its experience as a vendor to Government could be of some value to AGIMO’s review.
Microsoft is just trying to intervene so that it does not get excluded based on the fact that it sells unacceptable lock-in. This is where the pretence comes into play. If Microsoft can pretend to be a FOSS embracer and also use front groups to speak ‘on behalf’ of small businesses, then no public policy will get rid of the real issue. For what it’s worth, Novell helped Microsoft a lot in this regard (pretending that Microsoft is friendly towards GNU/Linux). Due to Novell influence (at least in part), OOXML in LibreOffice remains problematic, and that’s despite the PR statement from LibreOffice. To quote a new article: “As of now, LibreOffice doesn’t look very different and other than incorporating patches from the Novell Go-OO project, it’s pretty much the same although it appears that the fork will diverge further in coming versions. Moreover, a lot of cleaning house has taken place under the hood. As of now, there’s no roadmap on where the project is headed.” This is the type of thing which helps Microsoft lobby for OOXML in Australia and the Novell-funded Go-OO team should be ashamed of itself. █
Permalink
Send this to a friend
« Previous Page — « Previous entries « Previous Page · Next Page » Next entries » — Next Page »
