“The negative impact of standards for competition are mostly caused by a biased endowment with resources available for the standardization process itself. Therefore. even when the consensus rule is applied, dominant large companies are able to manipulate the outcome of the process, the specification of a standard, into a direction which leads to skewed distribution of benefits or costs in favor of their own interests.” --Prof. Dr. Knut Blind, Fraunhofer

SOME months ago we wrote about the incestuous relationship between Fraunhofer Fokus-DIN-Microsoft. This passionate love affair bears fruit.

Together with Fraunhofer FOKUS, Microsoft is working to streamline the process of exchanging data among organizations leveraging disparate systems. This is why technology industry experts participating in the Document Interoperability Initiative (DII) forum have stressed the need for independent resources set up to offer both testing and validation of files based on IS29500 and ECMA-376 standards implementations. The new tools and website produced by Fraunhofer FOKUS will come to fill this need.

Fraunhofer has made it clear (repeatedly in fact) where it puts its chips. Earlier in the week (and last week) we also showed examples where Microsoft rewrites the history of ODF in order to injure the standard. See for example:

• OOXML BRM Convenor (Alex Brown) Joins the Pro-Microsoft Wikipedia Spinners
• Microsoft Starts Attacking the ODF Alliance, Sends Paid Wikipedia Editors to ODF Article (Updated)
• Is Microsoft's AstroTurf Against ODF Still On?
• Microsoft Folks Rewrite ODF's History and Build Anti-ODF Social Network
• From MSODF to MSPDF?

Albert Zonneveld ("hAl") keeps censoring Wikipedia for Microsoft today. How kind. ⬆