OOXML has some serious problems that almost everyone is aware of. This new cartoon shows one of these serious problems and this older one explains why Novell supports it nonetheless.

OOXML has a lot going for it. It has a lot of lobbying and manipulation going for it, as the following article shows.

The free software world is being attacked by a large, wealthy, brutal monopolist, who I’ll call “Megatron” for today. As I wrote last month, Megatron is driving its OOXML tank through the village church of open standards, doing unspeakable things to the ISO process, with the intention of locking in a generation of computer users to its stack of patented, restricted, and undocumented formats. It’s about freedom, some of us want it, others want to take it away from us.

OOXML, owing to the deception and market manipulation, cannot be entirely ignored anymore. Even Sun Microsystems gives up and addresses the new needs for OOXML import filters.

How far have we got with the development of OOXML filters? First of all, Sun's OpenOffice.org developers are only working on import filters, that is, filters that read OOXML documents into OpenOffice.org. We are not working on export filters, that is, filters that save OOXML documents. Simple reason is that the both situations I've described above only require OOXML import filters. For saving documents, we have ODF.

If it were not for Novell's deal, OpenOffice would not have had any code that is associated with OOXML. But Novell signed a deal that mandates support for OOXML in OpenOffice.org. Microsoft paid Novell to 'poison' a competing product and put patented technology in it. This is unacceptable.

Here is a new interview with Bob Sutor.

Why doesn't IBM use their advertising muscle to counteract the Microsoft FUD?

There has been a tremendous amount of broad community rebuttal of nonsensical information that is self-serving and anti-open source and anti-open standards. We contribute where necessary in various ways as we speak with customers, analysts, and anyone else appropriate.

What do you see for the future of IBM's involvement with Linux?

More and better!

Well, we shall wait and see if IBM does not extend their new Linux relationship with Novell any further. LinuxWorld gave some reasons to ponder the implications.

Related links:

• Malaysia formally embraces open doc format
• Government of Japan Embraces Open Software Standards
• The ODF vs. OOXML numbers. Hint, OOXML is doing poorly.
• [OOXML:] e to the power of hype