Wired Magazine contains a nice new item in its blog. It talks about attempts to assimilate and become part of the "open everything" movement for personal gains and without any true openness. Microsoft, unsurprisingly, is listed as an excellent example (more information in the links at the bottom).

1. Joining an 'Openness' Consortium...

2. Creating an Arbitrarily Open Standard...

3. Rebranding Existing Features...

4. Buying Into (and Locking Up) an Existing Open Standard Big businesses are great at jumping on bandwagons. But even when they chase a revolutionary idea like openness, it's only a matter of time before it's back to business as usual. Take for instance Microsoft's foray into Linux territory. The software giant wet its beak in the open source movement by partnering with Novell to distribute its own version of the operating system. But after briefly playing nice, Redmond went on a saber rattling campaign claiming that Linux violates 235 of its patents. Guess who Microsoft granted amnesty from its would-be legal assault? That's right -- Linux users who had bought into Microsoft's version of "openness".

Novell, Scaled & Xandros, Linspire, Turobolinux, Samsung, Kyocera Mita, Fuji Xerox, LG, the OSI, Corel, ISO, Apache, Zend, XenSource (Citrix), CIsco and Apple ought to pay attention to the text above.⬆

Related posts:

• Destruction Through Assimilation
• The OSI Invasion Merely Follows the Linspire/Xandros/Novell/Turbolinux Invasion
• Dissecting Microsoft's OOXML/ODF Strategy