Bonum Certa Men Certa

Desperate to Stop Free Software and Standards, Microsoft Uses Lobbying to Push Patents, Subvert Government

The scam which is OOXML lives on



Summary: What some newly-leaked letters and analyses help teach us about Microsoft's wrongdoing and corruption in the public arena

A FEW days ago, Dr. Moody exposed yet more dirty tricks from Microsoft, this time right here in the UK.



Francis Maude MP sought advice from the British public, but will other Brits (other than Microsoft lobbyists) submit consultation letters? "Our approach will enable the Government to work collectively together but effective open standards for software and systems are required to ensure interoperability between software systems, applications and data," writes Maude. "Within the Government Digital Service we are already demonstrating how collaboration between departments, along with a clear focus on the user, delivers better public services for less. Open Standards are crucial for sharing information across government boundaries and to deliver a common platform and systems that more easily interconnect."

"Open standards are vital for progressing this work and I encourage you to share your views in this consultation."

How can Microsoft subvert this logical plan? Simple: redefine "open". Mark Ballard followed Moody's lead for a change, reporting that the Microsoft-subsidised "lobby triumphs in first open standards showdown":

Software patent heavyweights piled into the first public meeting of the Cabinet Office consultation on open standards on 4 April, conquering the meeting ballot with a resounding call to scrap the government's policy on open standards.

Open source and open standards campaigners complained they hadn't been invited to the Round Table event, the proceedings of which Cabinet Office will use to decide the fate of its beleaguered open standards policy.

Government supporters felt a growing sense of urgency over the consultation. Scattered and underfunded, they looked incapable of standing up to the big business interests that induced the consultation with backroom lobbying and have stepped forward now the debate has been brought out into the open.

Computer Weekly understands Cabinet Office officials regretted they hadn't got the meeting call out to a wider audience. Open standards supporters who attended complained it was stacked with opponents who easily dominated a meeting motion against the government's open standards policy.

Linda Humphries, Cabinet Office open standards official, said yesterday in a blogged report of the meeting: "The consensus was that the... proposed policy would be detrimental to competition and innovation."

Graham Taylor, chief executive of Open Forum Europe, which has worked closely with Cabinet Office IT policy makers, said he was "disappointed" the meeting hadn't been "representative".


Glyn Moody published the second part of the dirty Microsoft laundry he had gotten hold of. "In yesterday's post about Microsoft's lobbying of the Cabinet Office against truly open standards based on RF licensing," he writes, "I spent some time examining the first part of a letter sent by the company on 20 May last year. The second part concentrates on the issue of open standards for document exchange. This touches on one of the most brutal episodes in recent computing history - the submission of Microsoft's OOXML file format to ISO for approval."

Further down he says: "In other words, as a result of a decision by single city in the US to adopt open standards for documents (also mentioned in Microsoft's letter of May 20), Microsoft set in train an immense sequence of events that culminated in the accelerated adoption of OOXML as an ISO standard."

"That, in a nutshell, is the power of truly open standards, especially when implemented by open source, because everything is driven by a desire for openness and interoperability. This sets a very high bar that other companies must then match if they wish to remain competitive, as Microsoft's hurried actions demonstrate.

"A few months later, on 31 August, Microsoft sent an email to the Cabinet Office that included a policy paper "compiled by Microsoft Corp" as it says in the footer, on the same subject, entitled "The Importance of Neutral of Multiple-Standards Policy in Document Format Standards" [.pdf]."

Glyn Moody did some further research to show that the cost of this sort of corruption from Microsoft may be close to a billion dollars (of British taxpayers' money). That may be about $70 per family, due to Microsoft's dirty tricks in government alone (putting aside the cost to businesses and homes). To quote:

As far as I can tell, the CEDI research is something to do with this, which points to this Danish government page with links to two studies. They're all in Danish, not unreasonably, but even with the help of Google Translate I can't find any figures about the savings of "moving to a flexible two standard" as claimed by the Microsoft email. But I assume it is backed up somewhere, so let's take it, and the €£500 million figure for the UK, on trust.

One of the interesting developments over the last few years is how the debate about TCO - Total Cost of Ownership - has died down. In the early years of this millennium, there were various studies, from both Microsoft and companies based around open source, that purported to show that their solution had a lower TCO than the rival's. Of course, much of this depended on the details, but it was striking that there was no clear winner in any of these comparisons. I think the reason that the TCO argument has disappeared today is simply that it wasn't possible to use it to decide between offerings because there wasn't any big difference between the two alternatives from that point of view.

What that means in practice is that the total cost of Microsoft-only or open source only solutions is broadly the same - the real differentiation comes in terms of other aspects, such as the companies offering support, ecosystems, freedom from lock-in etc.

So if the UK government could save €£500 million by moving from an open-source only office suite provision to a mixed one, as Microsoft claims, then, broadly speaking, it could similarly save €£500 million by moving from a Microsoft-only approach to the same mixed environment, if the calculation is carried out on a fair basis.

Microsoft's recent email implies that the current lock-in to Microsoft Office is costing the UK government something like half a billion pounds, give or take a few quid. Surely a powerful argument for moving to that two-standard solution based on Microsoft Office and ODF office suites as quickly as possible?


Over Finland we have learned that Microsoft is also attacking the attempts to move to FOSS. This is said to cost millions of dollars even though the population is considerably smaller (extrapolated to the US it would almost exceed the aforementioned numbers):

A report on the City of Helsinki's pilot project for the use of OpenOffice in the public administrations leaves the public with more questions than answers. The city trialled the Free Software productivity suite on the laptops of council members for ten months in 2011. The suite enjoyed high approval rates among its users. When the pilot was finished, the City produced a report stating that the costs of migrating the entire administration to OpenOffice would be very high.

"The City's report claims that it would cost EUR 3.4 million per year to run OpenOffice. This figure appears surprisingly high, and the report does not say how it was calculated," says Otto Kekäläinen", Finland coordinator of the Free Software Foundation Europe. "Without details, this figure seems baseless." Apparently, Helsinki's administration did not even contact major OpenOffice service providers to ask for their prices when preparing the report.


Over in Korea, the "world's most wired country," the cost of Microsoft lock-in is immeasurable. To quote a new article:

Nine years ago when Kim Kee-chang came back to his native country of South Korea, he had no idea he was coming back to start a tech war. But when he booted up Linux on his computer something strange happened: he couldn't use Korean Web sites.

"Basically I couldn't do anything," said Kim, the founder of OpenWeb, an organization dedicated to expanding web accessibility in Korea. "Pages were not adequately displayed on the screen, links didn't work, menus didn't work. Nothing worked."

Kim had discovered a glitch in an otherwise perfect system: for all intents and purposes, South Korea had become a slave to Internet Explorer and, by extension, Microsoft. It's a problem that Kim believes is rooted in pride; pride that has had damaging effects to Korea's Internet culture.

At the end of the 1990s, Korea developed its own encryption technology, SEED, with the aim of securing e-commerce. Users must supply a digital certificate, protected by a personal password, for any online transaction in order to prove their identity. For Web sites to be able to verify the certificates, the technology requires users to install a Microsoft ActiveX plug-in.

"The Korean government took a great deal of pride in that breakthrough security technology," Kim said. "They wanted it to be widely used in Korea." But ActiveX drew a lot of criticism in the international community.

Park Hun-myoung, a professor of public management and policy analysis at the International University of Japan, says that ActiveX plug-ins consume computing resources, often conflict with each other and contribute to bad computing practices by teaching users to always click "OK" on command prompts.


Using bribery, lobbying, distortion of public processes -- and at times retaliation, intimidation and bullying -- Microsoft has been able to depress and suppress attempts to do what citizens actually want their government to do. And some people still wonder what makes Microsoft so unusually malicious...

Watch Microsoft taking more positions of power in Africa. From the Microsoft press:

Cheick Modibo Diarra, Microsoft Corp's chairman for Africa, has been appointed interim prime minister charged with helping to restore civilian rule to the Saharan state of Mali after a coup last month, it was reported Tuesday. The appointment of Diarra, a former NASA astrophysicist who was born in the country, was announced on in a statement read out on state television, Reuters reported.


Entryism that money cannot buy (or need not even buy).

Recent Techrights' Posts

For the First Time in a Month OSI's "OpenSource.org" Blogs and It's Basically a Microsoft Blog Post (Microsoft Controls OSI)
For the first time in a month OSI writes something and it is Microsoft propaganda composed by a Microsoft-salaried operative
Microsoft, Already Borrowing 3 Billion Dollars a Month, is Trying to Cause Many People to Resign
MSN (i.e. Microsoft) and others openly admit it
They Want Activists to Just Barely Walk and Eat, Not Do Activism Anymore
It's sort of like the ending of '1984'
Non-Free JavaScript Programs in Banks Aren't Even the Biggest Problem
Technology was supposed to make life easier; in practice, however, for most of us the opposite effect can be observed
IBM is Obliterating Fedora
"Fedora releases were shipping with an increasing number of bugs on launch day even while I was using it for a several year stretch."
Red Hat Layoffs Expected in 5 Days (Monday)
"They will announce and proceed with the cuts on 08/11."
 
Links 07/08/2025: Hardware Wars, Mass Recall of Colgate Total Clean Mint, More Microsoft Holes Found
Links for the day
Gemini Links 07/08/2025: "Right To Manage" and LoRa Analysis
Links for the day
GAFAM 'Says' is Front Page "News"
The point of journalism is to check and assess facts, not parrot what people and companies merely claim
Links 07/08/2025: Apple Makes False Promises, More Trouble for Microsoft
Links for the day
OSS Didn't Always Mean Open Source Software
"oligarchs all the way down"
The Register MS Does More Microsoft Sez or GitHub Sez (Says) Pieces
60 minutes ago
Quit Perpetuating the Narrative of Gemini Protocol 'Dying' (It's False)
The "whisper campaign" against Gemini Protocol
Criticising Social Control Media in Social Control Media
Many people are quitting Social Control Media (fewer of them announce this in public)
Slopfarms Are Typically Fake News
Slopfarms typically relay falsehoods
Gemini Links 06/08/2025: Replacing a Pocket Watch and Buying in Bulk
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, August 06, 2025
IRC logs for Wednesday, August 06, 2025
August Hits Microsoft Hard: Dead Divisions, Dead Products, Layoffs Again (on Week 1)
Microsoft's debt is soaring
Slopwatch: Slow Day for LLM Slop, Serial Sloppers Still at It in Their Slopfarms
The Web would be better off if those sites went offline
Links 06/08/2025: Substack in Trouble, Slop Sceptic Shira Perlmutter Seeks Emergency Injunction Pending Appeal
Links for the day
Gemini Links 06/08/2025: Pinephone, Reverse-Engineering, and More
Links for the day
Links 06/08/2025: Faked Values of Slop Companies and Government Bailouts
Links for the day
FOSSY 2025 Conference Safety
The GAFAM-funded FOSSY 2025 is over
Microsoft's Favourite Pay-to-Say 'Analyst' Firm Has Just Collapsed
'Analysts' that helped propel Microsoft to fictional values akin to Ponzi schemes
Ask Google (Jeeves)
What does Google "know", not know, or would rather forget (or embellish)?
They Want You To Talk About Trump or 'The Other Bill' in Relation to Trafficking of Underage Girls for Sexual Exploitation
Just something we wanted to say...
How to Quadruple Your "Goodwill" Value and Grow Your (Wall) Street "Value" From $152B to $4000B Without Producing a Single Successful Product/Service
The longer it goes on for, the bigger the implosion will be
Staying Productive
Two very reputable institutions recently told us they now reckon Microsoft is somehow funding those SLAPPs against us
A Blow for Patent Ambitions of Bill Epsteingate
It's about money
66 Countries Where More People Use iPhones (or iPads) Than Microsoft Windows, According to statCounter Data
a list of countries where iOS now exceeds Windows
Apple's iOS Bigger Than Microsoft Windows in Many Countries
This ought to alarm Microsoft
The Mainstream Media Talks About Spotify Share Price and Price Hikes, Not Its Debt Increasing by About 33% in Just 12 Months
Spotify isn't a company in good shape
New "US Editor for The Register" is 80% Microsoft and Windows
they typically just treat Microsoft like the "Holy Grail" of "IT"
Microsoft is Apparently Sending Gag Orders or NDAs to Staff That Got Laid Off (“We were told not to post on LinkedIn. Not to say anything.”)
The main lies we keep seeing
Richard M. Stallman Has Published AI Memos Since 1980 (45 Years Ago)
Back when the term AI actually meant something
Gemini Links 06/08/2025: BitTorrent and Feedly Bots
Links for the day
Windows All-Time Lows, Android All-Time Highs in Kuwait
New lows for Windows can be found in many countries this month
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, August 05, 2025
IRC logs for Tuesday, August 05, 2025
Openwashing Slop... Using Slop!
So get ready for "open" "hey hi" with its proprietary models to engage in openwashing, helped by serial sloppers who use the LLMs to produce fake 'articles'.
On "Tragedy of the Commons in the Production of Digital Artifacts"
There's a better way to do things. None of that should involve GAFAM.
Gemini Links 05/08/2025: Opel Zoo near Frankfurt and Alhena 5.2.5
Links for the day
The Inflammatory Influence of Social Control Media Giants
CPC's ByteDance says it's cool
Microsoft v Planet Earth
Is Microsoft profitable?
IRC Turns 37
Internet Relay Chat (short: IRC), which started in 1988, turns 37 this month
Shortly After a Microsofter Took Over The Register as Editor in Chief Microsoft Tim (Tim Anderson) is Back and It's Still Microsoft Propaganda, Sometimes Funded by Microsoft
Notice his focus
Stricter Enforcement of Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act is Sorely Needed
Who's keeping track anyway?
Calling Plagiarism "Intelligence" is Pure Genius, Brilliance!
One thing to "like" (or dislike) about LLMs is how they're falsely marketed using various buzzwords
Geminispace Promises Simplicity But Also Provides a "bunch of forums that get flood-filled by agitation against the very essence of Gemini itself"
claims of stagnation in Geminispace started because of a person who spent a long time agitating against GNU/Linux as well
Zimbabweans Aren't Into Windows or Microsoft
This cannot be good news for GAFAM
Microsoft's Washington Layoffs Aren't Everything, They're Definitely Not Happening in Just One State in the US
Washington is just more strict with WARN notices
Gemini Links 05/08/2025: Lagrange v1.18.6, No Stagnation in Geminispace, and Fake Coding (Slop)
Links for the day
The Register's Editor in Chief (Who Left for Google) Told Me "AI" Was a Bubble, But Now The Register Gets Paid to Participate in Inflating This Bubble
A lot of the online media is a scam
The Register is Desperate for Money, According to The Register
I decided to check how they're doing as a business
Some Cola Formulas Aren't Secret, But the Barrier is the Branding
That's the power of the channel/distribution, marketing, and brand recognition (accomplished through endless marketing)
Introducing Mission:Libre and FreeXR (and BreakXR)
efforts that accompany the foundations put there by the Free Software Foundation in 1985
Slopwatch: WebProNews, LinuxSecurity, and Some Success Stories
Google News still has a slopfarm issue
Links 05/08/2025: Hey Hi (AI) Passing Fads and GAFAM "Embracing the Military"
Links for the day
Links 05/08/2025: Samsung and Microsoft Layoffs
Links for the day
Rumours of Mass Layoffs at Red Hat Next Week (August 11th, 2025)
The eleventh means next Monday
IBM is Shutting Down (Piecewise)
IBM is basically being liquidated
The Debian Language Police Department (PD)
"there has never been complaints about anyone that was offended by this -off package"
Tesla's Debt More Than Doubled in 2 Years and the Company Will Operate in the Red (at a Loss) Quite Soon
If your first-quarter net income is $409 million and you borrow billions from banks, plus interest to pay on those loans, then you're not far from returning to losses
When The Register MS Says "Linux Backdoor" It Actually Talks About Malware
The leading story in The Register US/MS this morning is Microsoft
Microsoft Windows Fell to 19% "Market Share" in Montenegro
Microsoft must be well aware of this trend
Why We Also Include Gopher Links in Our Gemini (Protocol) Links
There are still many people who use Gopher to relay their messages (like blog posts). They're mostly technical people.
Shouting is an Indication of a Lack of Convincing Argument
Beware what they are attempting to distract from
Mongolia: Microsoft Windows at All-Time Low
in 2009 when Windows was at 99.45% in Mongolia the company was "worth" less than 200 billion dollars
About a Quarter of Today's "linux" News in Google News Came From One Domain and It's a Slopfarm
Not kidding!
Gemini Links 05/08/2025: Zombie Threat and Switching to NixOS
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Monday, August 04, 2025
IRC logs for Monday, August 04, 2025
ChatGPT in Trouble
Watch out for the newer buzzwords
The Register MS Links to the Wrong statCounter Page
They link to older data
Dr. Andy Farnell Explains How Google Turned From "Librarian" Into "Oracle", Telling Us What to Think Instead of Where to Look
Google was always a lousy librarian
Microsoft Layoffs Continue in August 2025
If Microsoft is doing so well, how come about 10 rounds of layoffs in about 7 months in 2025?