As background you may wish to consider the following video, which UNC recently made available (a couple of months ago to be precise). At the beginning of this talk, Bob Sutor explains why Microsoft feels threatened by Web technologies and standards. Think about Silverlight, OOXML and a family of server-side technologies Microsoft wants replaced by something it controls.
While we're presenting the views of one IBM employee, it might as well be added that Microsoft's DOS attack with heaps of pointless pages received a pushback from China, the world's largest population. From the blog of another IBMer:
For another demonstration of pure disingenuousness let’s look at Microsoft/Ecma’s response to China’s comment.
China filed along with their No vote in September a comment explaining that “we found it is a very complex technology […] We think the fast-track procedure is not suitable for this DIS” and ending with “more time is necessary and essential to conduct a credible and responsible evaluation.“
Seems reasonable enough and it’s fair to say that this sentiment is shared by many.
In the domain of Free software, there are very few sites out there that offer exclusive coverage on community affairs and there are many gagging/censorship attempts
EPO workers are going on strike because their salaries don't keep up with price increases and tech companies without connections in "the channel" face long delays, low availability, and high prices (no "bulk" purchases), which further solidifies monopolies.
It would make sense for the EU to invest in its own workers and its own software projects, more so now that there are hostile countries both to the east and to the west
The Local Staff Committee The Hague (LSCTH) has this new paper about Willis Towers Watson (WTW) and its annual EPO-sponsored propaganda, pretending all is well when things are clearly dire