07.26.07
Posted in Interoperability, Linspire, Microsoft, Standard at 3:39 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
When a company — any company for that matter — deviates from standards, then all one is left with is ‘glue’. Seamless integration becomes a distance dream. Interoperability arrangements are never needed if established standards are employed.
According to this new press release, Linspire has just joined Interop Alliance. In other words, it accepts Microsoft’s reluctance to adhere to standard while Red Hat, for example, did not, until recently. This particular quote from Microsoft boggles the mind:
“Every day, enterprises across the globe face the challenges of making a wide variety of software from many different vendors work together.”
How about this new article about the Open Solutions Alliance? Were patent deals needed? Of course not. Given Microsoft’s attitute towards standards [zipped PDF], none of this is surprising anymore:
[Microsoft:] “we should take the lead in establishing a common approach to UI and to interoperability (of which OLE is only a part). Our efforts to date are focussed too much on our own apps, and only incidentally on the rest of the industry. We want to own these standards, so we should not participate in standards groups. Rather, we should call ‘to me’ to the industry and set a standard that works now and is for everyone’s benefit. We are large enough that this can work.”
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07.24.07
Posted in ECMA, ISO, Microsoft, Mono, Novell, Standard at 11:45 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Alarming headlines for alarming developments: an attempt to hijack the age of connected computing while shrewdly using rivals to exclude rivals.
In case you thought that OOXML is the principal and last concern to emerge from Microsoft’s Linux deals, be aware that there is more to come. This is not exactly news, but it is worth reiterating and bringing to people’s attention.
Having standards accepted and approved is no easy task. By ‘buying’ the opposition, Microsoft is essentially able to have its technology implemented by ‘the ‘other side’. It is a case of acquiring credibility, based not on technical merits. Novell has already built Silverlight compatibility — however loose it might be — using the controversial Mono. How long will it be before Novell also supports Microsoft’s attempt to replace PDF with a format that Microsoft controls? Never mind Flash, never mind ODF.
Be aware of that fact that Novell’s work on an ‘ODF killer’ and a ‘Flash killer’ is only the beginning. It won’t be long before Novell will further assist Microsoft’s secret plan to hijack the World Wide Web, as well.
An industry coalition that has represented competitors of Microsoft in European markets before the European Commission stepped up its public relations offensive this morning, this time accusing Microsoft of scheming to upset HTML’s place in the fabric of the Internet with XAML, an XML-based layout lexicon for network applications.
Microsoft remains quiet about its long-term plans. It does this for a reason. No company should ever enter a deal that puts the EU’s case against Microsoft in jeopardy, promotes a desktop monopoly (XPS, XAML, OOXML, etc), leads to unsubstantiated claims, and fuels unfounded fear. Microsoft has a pipeline of patented technology on the ‘production line’ for ISO approval. Whether it is more dangerous than fear which Microsoft has spread might be a separate debate altogether.
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Posted in America, Asia, Europe, Formats, Microsoft, Open XML, OpenDocument, OpenOffice, Standard at 8:57 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Microsoft’s Linux deals bought it some pseudo support. It gives the impression that the industry accepts OOXML. It is, however, nothing but a case of buying support.
India, the free market needs your help. As the following blog indicates, you can make a real difference. There is momentum, too.
There are Updates from Massachusetts, South Africa, Japan, Portugal, Spain etc. It Failed to get approval even in USA. South Africa TC Rejects OOXML 13 to 4
So Say No To Microsoft Office Broken Format OOXML .
This new article talks about Microsoft’s attempts to buy itself a standard. Standard should be earned, not bought. It is not a matter of pressure, either.
There are two upcoming votes on the fate of Microsoft’s Office Open XML, a document format that has brought about bare-knuckle business tactics and fierce philosophical disputes.
[...]
Meanwhile, Microsoft rivals are accusing the company of bullying its way through a standards process.
“The fundamental question is whether a large company with a lot of money and business partners will essentially be able to stack committees so that they are out of balance and therefore buy an ISO standard. I, for one, do not think this is appropriate. I doubt ISO does either,” Bob Sutor, IBM’s vice president of open source and standards, wrote earlier this month in his personal blog.
Let us ensure that the industry does not get locked down to formats which only Microsoft is permitted to implement. If you are aware of wrongdoing, please share. Do not let manipulation get out of sight. The Europe Commisions is already prepared to investigate this. We just need to gather evidence.
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Posted in Deception, Europe, Formats, Microsoft, Open XML, OpenDocument, OpenOffice, Standard at 5:57 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
If you wish to follow Microsoft’s path of destruction (or “cheating”) then head over to Groklaw which has the latest:
It seems there may have been more games played by Microsoft in the OOXML saga, or at the very least some confusion spread, and this time our story comes from Spain, where the government of Andalusia has now sent an official letter of protest [PDF, Spanish] to the president of the technical committee deciding whether or not to accept OOXML as an ISO standard, denouncing what it called an attempt by Microsoft to manipulate the process by selectively quoting from a letter from the Andalusian government back in January as if it were an endorsement of OOXML as an ISO standard today. That January letter, Andalusia says, was not intended to indicate that it felt there should be an acceptance of OOXML by the technical committee.
It has become hard to keep track of all these cases where Microsoft stuffs the ballots, buys votes, deceives people, hires men in suits who threaten politicians, gets people fired for supporting open standards…
Luckily, we have it all documented. Somewhere.
Update: Marbux and Gary have just published a key article. You might not like the sound of it.
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07.20.07
Posted in ECMA, Formats, ISO, Open XML, OpenDocument, Standard at 10:50 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
The weekend is almost here. The amount of news that is related the monopoly enabler (OOXML) is fairly large. Here is a quick summary.
Pamela wrote a long article which cites others. It also contains some very alarming piece of information. The takeaway: Miirosoft is proprietizing standards and ‘extending’ them. We have seen this before.
….when you proprietize standards, you touch me. And that is precisely what is happening with OOXML. Microsoft’s own expert at the Portugal meeting said so pointblank: Microsoft will add proprietary extensions, he said, to do things ODF can’t do.
Rob takes a look at some unbelievable slides from ECMA. These pretty much confirm that ECMA should be treated as nothing but a coin-in-the-slot standards organisation.
I’ve joked about the Ecma process before, but I never thought I’d see it written out officially like this. Standards are made available “on time”? Minimize the “risk” of changes? I thought the whole purpose of technical review was to find the problems and fix them? As always, the man who pays the piper calls the tune.
Bob has more to say about the questionable voting process.
I mention this because this general issue of stacking committees to force favorable votes is now under examination with respect to OOXML and the ISO/IEC JTC1 Fast Track process.
Mr. Jelliffe seems rather unhappy. He posted “Bribery Watch!”. It seems like a bizarre way of accusing people of inaccuracies or maybe even slander. These arguments needn’t get ugly, but where corruption (yes, it’s a strong word, I know) is identified and where people game the system, something simply must be said. If you say nothing, the consumer will continue to suffer whilst greedy corporation exploit loopholes. Whose side are you on?
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07.19.07
Posted in Africa, Formats, Open XML, OpenDocument, Standard at 9:33 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Support by as many as 4 Linux companies (Microsoft ‘partners’) was apparently not enough to convince South Africa that OOXML is acceptable. Tectonic has the news.
Open standards beat Microsoft 13 to 4
[...]
“South Africa will vote no,” she said, referring to the international voting to take place.
This truly is relieving given some recent uncertainties. South Africa and Japan are just 2 among several countries that have recently come to realise, approve, and acknowledge the importance of open, vendor-independent formats.
In related news, I came across an article that discusses Microsoft and standards. Some people want you to believe that only negligence led to poor support of Web standards in Internet Explorer, but as the following new article shows, this total disregard for standard is seemingly deliberate. Right from the horse’s mouth:
In a video interview with ZDNet Australia last month, Microsoft blogger and group manager of technical community, Frank Arrigo, explained how important it is for the Redmond giant to follow Web standards.
“Standards are important,” said Arrigo, who admitted that Microsoft had been guilty of ignoring them in the past. “If you look at IE6, we didn’t quite follow all the standards but standards are important … IE7 as an example is trying to address that.”
That is exactly why Microsoft can never be trusted when it comes to document formats. It is just one reason among many. We have shown many similar examples before, including an admission that Microsoft wants to avoid standard bodies and exploit its userbase (size) to go de facto. Remind yourself of this old antitrust exhibit [PDF]:
From: Bill Gates Sent: Saturday, December 05, 1998 9:44 AM
To: Bob Muglia (Exchange); Jon DeVaan; Steven Sinofsky
Cc: Paul Mariz
Subject: Office rendering
One thing we have got to change is our strategy — allowing Office documents to be rendered very well by OTHER PEOPLES BROWSERS is one of the most destructive things we could do to the company.
We have to stop putting any effort into this and make sure that Office documents very well depends on PROPRIETARY IE capabilities.
Anything else is suicide for our platform. This is a case where Office has to to destroy Windows.
I’ll be posting quickly today (mainly due to lack of free time), so apologies for the scarce level of commentary, lack of polish, and poor writing style. Most of the posts are composed in haste and the pointers ought to complement the key messages.
Update: there are some interesting reactions to the news from South Africa and one item cannot escape without a quick mention.
The apparent decisiveness of this particular National Body vote [in South Africa] is less of a surprise than might otherwise be the case, given that South Africa is one of the nations that has experienced a stormy experience with document formats in the past. As I reported back in February, the SABS warned that if harrassed by proprietary proponents of standards, it would no longer abstain in voting, but would vote against the standard in question.
Hey, Adam Farquhar, are you watching this? Will the misuse of invaluable public data in the United Kingdom continue?
Another item worth mentioning is an excellent OOXML-chef analogy from Rob Weir.
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Posted in ECMA, Europe, Formats, Microsoft, Open XML, OpenDocument, Standard at 6:59 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
It is truly astonishing to find that many government bodies actually have their key positions occupied by Microsoft employees. I am intimately familiar with quite a few examples and I will name only two.
The first one is very recent. It comes from New York where Microsoft muscled the legislature and lobbied to pass a so-called ‘Microsoft amendment’ that is discriminative towards Open Source.
Microsoft’s proposed change to state law would effectively render our current requirements for escrow and the ability for independent review of source code in the event of disputes completely meaningless – and with it the protections the public fought so hard for.
An older example involved changing of an important report by a Microsoft employee.
That agreement was nearly imperiled last weekend, though. Gerri Elliott, corporate vice president at Microsoft’s Worldwide Public Sector division, sent an e-mail message to fellow commissioners Friday evening saying that she “vigorously” objected to a paragraph in which the panel embraced and encouraged the development of open source software and open content projects in higher education.
So much for independent assessment for the benefit of the citizens, eh? Welfare and greed are mutually exclusive and even contradictory.
Here comes the latest finding, which is concerned with Microsoft’s OOXML — the very effective venom that Linux ‘partners’ are forced to digest. Another discussion with Mark Kent led to another example where public money is being used to promote Microsoft’s agenda by locking vital data to this monopoly. The BBC is not the only Linux-hostile establishment over here.
Watch this discussion in an article about archiving data using suitable formats
Open-source advocates claim that the Microsoft-championed format is not as open as it should be and doesn’t compare well to rival formats such as the community-developed OpenDocument Format (ODF).
“If it were, Microsoft wouldn’t need to make Novell and Xandros and Linspire sign NDAs (nondisclosure agreements) and then write translators for them,” Pamela Jones, an open-source expert and editor of the Groklaw blog, wrote recently.
But the National Archives said that it is not wedded to any particular data format and that all technology options are being considered at this time.
Mark did a little legwork and found out a little bit more about National Archives, which seemingly chose to sidle with Microsoft and even gleefully talked about OOXML in a recent BBC article.
Mark wrote:
Look at this, from the *joint* National Archives and /Microsoft/ press
release:
Adam Farquhar, Head of eArchitecture at the British Library and
co-chair of the Office OpenXML standards committee said:
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
|
|
So this guy, paid for by *our* taxes, is working for Microsoft
to promote their proprietary formats. Now look at this:
“Microsoft has shown considerable initiative working with The National
Archives, The British Library and others to increase our ability to
ensure access to today’s digital information tomorrow. This announcement
represents an important step and shows the sort of value that effective
collaboration between public and private organisations can bring to the
challenge of preserving our nation’s heritage.”
Which you can sum up as:
“we’re putting national heritage, at tax-payer’s expense, into
the hands of the world’s greatest monopolist, to ensure access
to data in the future”.
So we, the taxpayer, have to *pay* to have *our* data locked into a
proprietary format which will never be readable on standard platforms,
supplied by a company which cannot even manage to add a proper ODF
format to its office suite, and pushed by a guy, Adam Farquhar, who *we*
pay for, who chairs an OOXML “standards” committee.
This is just beyond anything you could imagine. Can we get this guy
moved to a more suitable job – in Microsoft, say?
So there you go. Apparently, lock-in is about ‘politics’, not rational choices. Microsoft has always loved escaping discussions about technical merits and turning them into a political debate. It is easier. It’s diversion.
We could probably just learn from continental Europe. It understands better than most that open standards are essential. OOXML is not open, even though the acronym contains the word “open” within it. OOXML goes against the existing unified standard. On the other hand:
EU backs standard for mobile TV
[...]
David McQueen, principle analyst with research firm Informa, is not surprised that the EU has come down in favour of DVB-H.
“It is the most open standard and there are more players in the market. Finland has networks already and in France there is a satellite hybrid solution,” he said.
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07.18.07
Posted in ECMA, Europe, Formats, ISO, Microsoft, Open XML, OpenDocument, OpenOffice, Standard at 8:21 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
We have witnessed a lot of wrongdoing in recent days. Committees do not appear to have done their job properly, but the good news is that outside intervention might be on its way.
Microsoft Corp., the world’s largest software maker, is facing deeper scrutiny from European regulators on whether it is abusing its dominance in word processing and spreadsheets, three people with direct knowledge of the case said.
Only yesterday, calls were made to support open standards in Europe. For those who have not followed the recent events, ComputerWorld has a digest. Bob Sutor wrote about the recent developments as well, with emphasis on Europe.
Remember the stories from Portugal? Well, a lot more information is finally available. Groklaw has just posted large lumps of text and questioned the voting process.
Is this how standards are normally approved? If so, can we fix it? If Ecma-376 gets “approved” by shoving it through and not allowing interested parties to speak or vote, that just isn’t an open standard to me. Is it to you? Yoo hoo, Massachusetts. Are you watching?
Andy Updegrove weighed in with a provocative title on an “OOXML End Game”.
The progress of a technical specification from development to adoption has a certain, often-lamented glacial quality to it, due to the consensus process involved. But while that process may be slow, it is not inexorable, and that which starts does not always finish.
In other related news, here is a story about a city government which is being migrated to OpenOffice.org.
Dave Richards is an IT administrator for a city government. The city has been using OpenOffice.org for about six years. Dave’s a Linux guru, and helps run an elegant, efficient Linux network with a nice big server and lots of fairly old dumb terminals running OpenOffice.org at a very acceptable speed.
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