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 GNU/Linux, OpenSUSE at 7:48 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Just for your information.
No comments seem necessary, but changes at this level are never a sign of health.
openSUSE gets a new manager
From: Andreas Jaeger [OMITTED]
To: opensuse-announce-AT-opensuse.org
Subject: [opensuse-announce] openSUSE distribution Project Manager change
Date: Wed, 18 Jul 2007 15:51:10 +0200
I’m glad to announce that I have given over my responsibilities for the
openSUSE distribution to Stephan Kulow [OMITTED]. As from now on
Stephan is project manager for the openSUSE distribution.
Stephan – known also as Coolo – the “born release dude”, has been with
Novell/SUSE for five years. Before that he worked on Linux distributions
at Caldera. His wide experience in Linux includes the dinosaurs (called
s390), desktop technology (KDE), several build systems (including his
own at Caldera), and SUSE tools like package translation.
Stephan’s first challenge will be the release of openSUSE 10.3 Alpha6
this week and I fear I’ve left him some hard nuts to crack. Having
worked with Stephan for many years, we can expect nothing but an
excellent openSUSE
10.3 release in the end. 
Btw. in my new function as Director of Platform and openSUSE, I’ll stay
involved with openSUSE,
Andreas
Correction: as Stephen points out, Andreas was in fact promoted, so there is no real sign of weakness here. Apologies for the mistake and thank you, Stephen, for the quick response.
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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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Posted in Site News at 12:46 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
We typically deliver over 3,000 pages per day (to human visitors, not bots), but yesterday was a rare exception with over 35,000 pages delivered. Not even our interview with Jeremy Allison attracted so much interest.
The Web site might have some impact after all. When Shane and I started 8 months ago, we were happy enough to just write down our thoughts and maybe receive the attention of a few readers whose curiosities intersect.
It is probably the blue bars that you ought to look at. Bandwidth was exceptionally high because returning visitors have cache enabled (which reduces server load).
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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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Posted in GPL, Microsoft, Novell, Quote at 7:23 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
A friend of mine, Mark Kent, took a different angle and explained what Microsoft is trying to achieve. With permission, I’ll quote this in full.
“In case anyone hasn’t realised, this [Linux deals and retaliation] has become Microsoft’s anti-GPLv3 campaign, ably assisted by various open-source luminaries, naturally.
Microsoft’s intent is that customer pressure will somehow force Linspire, Novell and others to avoid GPLv3, who will then somehow push back on the GPLv3 projects through forking or pressure to get them back onto GPLv2.
It won’t work, because they’re trying to push a pyramid from the point, but it’s an interesting attempt.”
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Posted in Deals, Europe, GNU/Linux, Novell, Scalix, Servers, UNIX, Windows, Wine, Xandros at 3:10 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
A Linux company that joined Microsoft and its FUD crusade has just acquired another. Scalix is, as far as I can recall, a proprietary solution built on top of GNU/Linux. It has had some big business contracts recently (notably Specsavers). The bad news is that it has just been acquired by Xandros.
Xandros CEO Andy Typaldos told DesktopLinux.com that his Ottawa-based Linux desktop and server company has acquired privately owned open-source e-mail and calendaring provider Scalix under terms that were undisclosed.
Will this mean that Microsoft can collect ‘tax’ from even more products that they do not own?
Update: Perhaps we posted this news earlier than we should have. Why? Because it gets worse. Xandros seems to have gotten itself another little partnership which involves some very popular GPL-licensed software. It is software that comes ‘in contact’ with Windows.
Recall some old debates about CrossOver Office, virtualisation, and Wine. Microsoft plays the patent game against all of these because such software is sometimes considered a “Windows killer”. It obviates the need for Microsoft and gives access to some very powerful applications that otherwise require Microsoft dependencies, not just compatibility layers, APIs, or a hypervisor.
We could truly learn from UNIX here. Remember Xenix? Microsoft tried to ensure that each competitor which rivaled its own offering had some form of debt. This way, Microsoft extracts from anything bought, no matter who the seller is. Recall the antitrust videos (hint: making profit from a competitor’s revenue).
According to a new article from Reuters, Microsoft will soon face the important decision in Europe. It will happen in September this year. As far as that ruling goes, Novell did a lot of harm and did Microsoft a favour.
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Posted in ECMA, Europe, Formats, ISO, Microsoft, Open XML, Standard at 12:22 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
It’s not just Britain and it isn’t just Portugal, either. Watch the following observation which comes from Italy. Voting on OOXML seems like a rather iffy business, not just in the United States. The story, however, ends nicely.
Actually it is quite impressing seeing how the voting panel [for OOXML] was formed. Particularly noteworthy is the fact that among those favouring the adoption of the standard without reservation a large majority is made of business partners of the proposing entity [Microsoft], a law firm retained by the latter, the official certified business partners association of the proposing entity. “Money can’t buy me love” Beatles used to sing: perhaps neither a standard.
Fortunately, this attempt was not successful. I wish to quote a comment that I spotted in Digg when a BoycottNovell story reached the front page:
OOXML is not an open standard. It is an XML representation of Microsoft’s proprietary data structures used in their line of office software. It is only designed to match the feature set of MS Office and nothing else. It ignores the pre-existing ISO standards for dates/times, mathematical formula as well as using poor XML design practices.
If Microsoft truly intended to use an open format for their office software they would have joined the committee for the ODF standard and proposed the features they needed to be added to the specification. Instead, they are trying to trick people looking for open standards that their OOXML is an open format. Even if the specification is open for use, and that it would be under the control of an independent organization (required for ISO standardization), you can bet that Microsoft will deviate from the standard as soon as possible once they hold the majority of market share, convincing users that the other software is ‘broken’.
ODF isn’t perfect, but it is much closer to what is needed. It uses common standards that are already supported and provides a vendor neutral specification for generating generic, compatible, documents.
Actually, I’ll quote another comment because it is short and precise:
Per the usual, Microsoft is engaging in shady dealing and collusion in order to forward its own agenda. Not that this sort of corruption is unique to Microsoft by any means, but it is typical of large corporations who have reached the point where they lack the agility to compete on a technical level and therefore must do so on the playing-field of bought influence and barriers to entry.
Update: you might find the following item from the Inquirer amusing: Microsoft twists and turns over ODF – Microsoft claims ODF is a monopoly. Pot calls kettle black.
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