DO YOU like standards?

Do you like standards when Microsoft preaches them to you?

How about 'open' standards that are brought to you by a company that blackmailes, bullies, bribes and lies to establish them?

The same company which shattered the standards industry wants to bring some of its brainwash to more innocent minds. It seems like a familiar story.

“The same company which shattered the standards industry wants to bring some of its brainwash to more innocent minds.”Will you attend such an event?

Well, worry not as nobody else will attend, either. There was a plan for "Some [...] Rick Jelliffe from Topologi with an Overview of XBRL, Microsoft’s Lawrence Crumption with a presentation entitled ‘Openly Excited: Microsoft, Open Source and Open Specification’..."

For the uninitiated, Rick Jelliffe was actively involved in promoting OOXML, even on Microsoft's payroll [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18]. But it's all cancelled now. As reported by IDG, "The Open Standards 2008 conference scheduled to be held in Sydney this week has been cancelled due to a lack of registrations."

Given the farce that ISO has become, who can blame the target audience for lack of attendance? Standards as a whole were disreputed -- arguably ruined -- by the Microsoft/ISO tag-team operation. And sadly enough, with the decline of standards, the only party to be grinning with glee must be Microsoft.

In the blogosphere, turncoat journalists, now enlisted by Microsoft, preach about interoperability, which only interferes with open standards that Microsoft deliberately ignores.

Elsewhere in the press, there is a lot of harping and raving from Microsoft (even a press release) about joining a standards group, but skepticism is only to be expected.

I've no idea whether AMQP is indeed the bee's knees, as Red Hat would have us believe, but I do know this: if Microsoft *really* wants to join in the open fun, it must always freely license its contributions, as Red Hat says it has done for AMQP. If the devil *insists* on supping with you, do check that you have a good supply of long spoons first.

After decades of dirty operations, does Microsoft believe it deserves trust? It's like the famous story about The Scorpion and the Tortoise. ⬆

"[A]mazing that corruption is excepted by the entire developed world. stunning that it has met with resistance only with some developing nations and maybe the european union. what should have been an overwhelming anger by all nations . the notion that developed nation are immune to corruption is bogus. microsoft did it in full view, without any hesitation. microsoft should be nailed for this."

--Ashok Pai