Microsoft is Still Waging a Relentless War Against Open Standards (Not Just Against Software Freedom)
"Any technology leader, in the public or private sector, who is not supporting and implementing open standards should resign and get out of the business."
THE World Wide Web has very short memory span (partly the fault of the Open Web's death), but the Wayback Machine helps us go back to old documents from the golden ODF days. For instance, consider that the NATO Interoperability Standards and Profiles page. It said (before vanishing forever): "When a supported browser is not true to the standard, choose to support the browser that is closest to the standard..."
They insisted on Web standards - not clown computing nonsense (outsourcing) - and even said: "All XMPP Chat Clients used on the AMN shall implement these two protocol extensions" (again, no "clown" collaboration tools but open standards). Further down it speaks of "OASIS Open Document Format ODF 1.0 (ISO/IEC 26300)," which is an old version already.
Then consider Nokia before Microsoft killed it from the inside (Seeking Alpha and Tomi T Ahonen covered it). Jorma Ollila, Chairman of Nokia's Board of Directors, said that "Open standards and platforms create a foundation for success. They enable interoperability of technologies and encourage innovativeness and healthy competition, which in turn increases consumer choice and opens entirely new markets" (Kauppalehti (2006) and Nokia's site both yield error pages now, so that is dead and buried, including "NOKIA: Nokia Foundation Award to Mårten Mickos").
That back in 2006 (dead links now though). Only six years between those two articles (Kauppalehti and Seeking Alpha).
Before Microsoft killed Nokia, "it was very much for OSS and Open Standards," an associate reminds us. Why can't we go back to 2006 and adopt the advice of Former Massachusetts state government CIO Peter Quinn, whom we've just mentioned? IDG said Quinn "believes that any technology leader, in the public or private sector, who is not supporting and implementing open standards should resign and get out of the business."
The associate moreover suspects that latest phase-out of an old protocol, as noted in the news the other, may mean that Kerberos is under an imminent attack by Microsoft. Yet another attack.
"I would guess that their new replacement is so extensively modified as well as burdened with patents and copyrights and lack of documentation that it would be impossible to implement even with a lot of money and lawyers," the associate explains. "Remember that in 2000 [or thereabout] Microsoft broke Kerberos by extending it and tried to threaten the (then) FOSS Slashdot into silence over it. Microsoft made the controversy disappear by modifying the official specification to permit such proprietary extensions."
Microsoft can say it "loves Linux" all day long (it's still a lie). In reality is it attacking not only GNU/Linux but the foundation of its adoption, namely Free software licences (Microsoft viciously attacks the GPL on an unprecedented scale) and open standards free of software patents, including notorious submarine patents. Do not trust anything Microsoft says or promises. The company is run by liars and cheats who, in a truly functional democratic society, would be behind bars for decades. Stealing almost 30 billion dollars from the public is not an arrestable offence? But shoplifting gets you handcuffed immediately? █