Bonum Certa Men Certa

Microsoft Still Creates Barriers to ODF

Road to the green



Summary: OpenDocument Format (ODF) suffers more interferences and interruptions from Microsoft and its followers

A FEW days ago, Novell's and Microsoft's role in harming Web standards was mentioned, but Adobe has a similar agenda and Jan Wildeboer from Red Hat warns that "Adobe plans to redefine the Internet with their proprietary stuff."



Adobe also has PDF for documents, which is not particularly good, but it is far less malicious than Microsoft's attempt to control documents. As one person has put it, "rtf is as bad as .doc, ideally I'd say use ODF, but MS users will gripe it's not supported"

“Microsoft insists on making ODF look as though it is proprietary and its lobbyists do the same type of thing in panels they invade.”Microsoft is a company far less ethical than Adobe, simply based on its actions. For instance, Microsoft subverts Wikipedia's entry on ODF such that it advances OOXML. Jomar Silva has just told Tim Bray that "the ODF entry is a mess, and don't try to fix it, because a jerk named hAl is keeping the mess there !"

That would hardly be news, but hAl is just one among a group that carries on making the article on ODF worse and worse. John Drinkwater has undone yet another hostile and unnecessary change ("Undid revision 317727032 by Cybercobra not a useful change, standard is built upon XML"). This was done in response to a couple of edits from Cybercobra.

Here is Cybercobra removing mentions of "free" and "open" as though they are dirty words. We have seen this before. Microsoft insists on making ODF look as though it is proprietary and its lobbyists do the same type of thing in panels they invade.

ODF has sincere following (not Microsoft partners) and the ODF Toolkit continues to be mentioned a lot, as well as the next Plugfest -- an event we previously mentioned in [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 9 10, 11]. Microsoft attended the last Plugfest where it promoted its agenda along with its partners and MVPs.

A pro-Microsoft saboteur wants more access to ODF, probably hoping that people do not remember what he did. Bart Hanssens meanwhile prepares a working draft of an ODF interoperability profile and publishes the following about Xapian.

Xapian is an open source search engine library written in C++ with bindings for C#, Java, PHP and Ruby. It supports the most commonly used document formats, including of course ODF.


What's the deal with OLE objects, which are Microsoft's way of blocking standard adoption?

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