Bonum Certa Men Certa

Stephane Rodriguez's Latest on OOXML Intra-operability, Munich's Mayor Protests Against OOXML

Cracking attempts against my Web sites continue, so I am likely to find little time to post here. It's more severe than some previous issues.

In general, it's all just a tad suspicious. I now find Microsoft partners like Stocholm posting on a regular basis in Linux newsgroups (most recent example here). But what is curious are not the cracking attempts, some of which were successful, but the quick response.

“Anyway, education about OOXML must carry on to combat disinformation and manufactured consent.”As soon as a site gets hacked, Microsoft Munchkins are accusing me in public of spreading malware (portraying a victim as a criminal) and trying to have my sites blacklisted. They are flooding the whole of USENET, which gets mirrored and accessed via HTTP. At times like these, I can't help but think about Bob Sutor's almost obsessive patching habits.

Anyway, education about OOXML must carry on to combat disinformation and manufactured consent. As a few links and articles worth reading today, consider this new technical analysis which speaks about the impossibility of OOXML interoperability.

A couple of counter examples have demonstrated that Microsoft Office document interoperability is wishful thinking at this point. The documents made available by Microsoft for direct download won't and shouldn't impress third-party implementers since it does not help much.

What is being shown is that in addition to missing documentation, the binary documentations sometimes conflict with the ECMA 376 documentation, itself not a full documentation of the new XML-based formats anyway.


Remember ECMA's response to such issues (hint: “I Have Never Seen a Person So Nervous and Ashamed in My Life” ).

In other good news, just days after protests from Oracle, Red Hat, Google and others, the mayor of Munich calls for abolishment of OOXML. Groklaw has a translation. Here is part of it.

Mayor of Munich opposes OOXML being made a Standard (German)



Munich's mayor Christian Ude says in a letter to the Federal Minister for Economics and Technology, Michael Glos, he thinks there should be a clear "no" to the standardization of OOXML. The German Institute for Standardization (DIN) is currently evaluating how to vote in the ISO standardisation procedure. All the city needs, Ude indicates, is OpenDocument Format (ODF), already an ISO standard, and he believes competition is weakened by a competiting standards....


What the world needs is an industry-wide standard, not a bunch formats that are controlled and can only be implemented by one company and supported (almost properly) by just one single application on one single platform.

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