Yes, I am aware of this issue. That’s why I hesitated before posing that remark. One thing to always wonder about if whether or not GNOME played a role in changing Trolltech’s strategy.

Because KDE was built on a framework with a non-free license back then?

QT has been re-licensed under the GPL only in 2000, while GNOME 1.0 was released a year earlier and had been started in 1997!

See, that’s the thing – I don’t believe for a minute that Miguel has Microsoft’s best interest in mind or even that there is some underhanded work by Miguel/Microsoft where Miguel gets paid by Microsoft in any way.

No, no, I never claimed that. Au contraire — Miguel’s interest is everything to do beating Microsoft using Free software. That said, Miguel’s interest is not just a personal interest, but also a communal one. The question is: does one outweigh the other? You see, developers will always have their personal ambitions, which needn’t fully intersect with those of the ‘community’ as a whole. The same goes for companies like Novell.

Heck, just take a look at the number of Microsoft partners that fight FOSS and ODF because this combination puts their business (or more broadly — the ecosystem) in jeopardy. It’s a question of equilibrium. Change is scary, but it needs to be understood and embraced, not feared.

Let it be clear that Miguel’s present work, which is great, is focused on (or at least centered around) Microsoft technologies. Miguel’s status depends on the success of this. Things like Silverlight needn’t intimidate him because that’s his turf, his expertise, his role, and that’s where he can contribute the most to FLOSS. A separate question that ought to be asked, however, is “how does it affect all of us?”

First off, Miguel started Mono back in the very early Ximian days (early 2001 or late 2000 iirc), years before his company got bought by Novell, so a conspiracy there is pretty laughable.

Never did we draw a similarity nor a relationship between Ximian and Novell, let alone Ximian and Microsoft.

Secondly, Miguel has a history of advocating Linux – go to any of his talks, and he’ll be demoing what can be done on Linux. You’ll never catch him running Windows or MacOS like so many of the “Linux Advocates” that bash him for his views. (note: I imagine Roy runs Linux exclusively, so this doesn’t necessarily apply to Roy himself, but it certainly applies to people like Matt Asay).

Yes, I consider him (Matt) a bit of a hypocrite for that. Mark Hinkle and Phil Shapiro likewise. There’s nothing that ever needs doing which I cannot do in GNU/Linux (FWIW, I have sympathy and even affinity for other free platforms as well). The question here is not “does Miguel advocate GNU/Linux and the Free desktop?” The question is how. What is the vision and how will this be accomplished? By playing second fiddle to Microsoft technologies where this is not required, we’re putting ourselves further behind. Come to consider, for instance, how Mozilla set the standard (not standard per se) for Web applications. A whole new and exciting generation of ‘networked software’ that Gates feared so much in the mid-nineties (watch some of the Iowa antitrust exhibits about this) became a reality.

Thirdly, while Miguel /did/ interview at Microsoft – he had been writing Free Software for years before that. In fact, that’s even how he was invited in the first place to interview at Microsoft in 1997 – they were looking for someone to help them do a SPARC-port of IE (Miguel had done the SPARC-port for Linux a year or 2 earlier). Seeing as how Microsoft likely would have paid a whole lot better than working as a sysadmin making peanuts per year at UNAM, I don’t think anyone could blame him for accepting an interview.

True. It ought to be mentioned, however, that even then he was excited by technologies like ActiveX (IIRC), which was (and has remained) proprietary. Read some of the recent articles from Tim Berners-Lee on his grim vision of a closed World Wide Web. Remember Netscape’s role in attempting to prevent this. At the moment, the worrisome crossroad is one that involves Sharepoint, OOXML, XAML, and XPS (among other bits of the proprietary Web stack).

The issue at hand and the reason for concern is this acceptance and ‘joining’ the trend wherein groups are ‘proprietising’ the Web — an initiative whose impact on the Free desktop is detrimental to its very relevance (and this its existence). We can do better than this and we have the backing of nations whose policies are strongly in favour of open source and open standards (mind the news from Holland last week).

Now, selfishly, I’m glad the Microsoft job didn’t work out, because he probably would not have been able to continue contributing to Free Software as he has been doing for the past 10 years since.

Okay, I know I’ll get flamed for this, but to paraphrase Sam from iTWire, KDE was getting along just fine. Choice is beautiful, but wouldn’t convergence have prevented this fragmentation? Wouldn’t it have resolved what we nowadays know as the free desktop (with an almost equal distribution that involves two mutually-exclusive desktop environments, which offer essentially the same function)? This isn’t a case of ‘bloat’ and ‘light’, or maybe desktops, servers, and miniature devices. Even the licences are quite similar at the moment. I am not entirely convinced all of this was needed. I used to take the opposite view, but seeing what I’ve seen recently, I pause and wonder.

Last week, for example, one reader pointed out that, according to the GNOME guys (maybe a Foundation member), OOXML support in Gnumeric was a case of getting ahead of the competition (FLOSS). Needless to say, all of this is harmful also because it helps ECMA (Microsoft) in its brutal ISO chase. The ISO is being ‘raped’, by the admission of its own people. It’s a scandalous case of ‘standardisation by corporation’ and it’s hard to ignore the role money has played, e.g. in the Novell deal. Meeks and Miguel are Novell employees. Jody Goldberg worked in Novell until July 2007, IIRC. You can’t just dismiss those critics who have become increasingly suspicious. Curious minds wish to know whatever there is to know (or not know). This isn’t a witch hunt; we just need to know the truth, even if it contradicts our hypotheses.

Fourthly, did you even READ Miguel’s blog post which said that OOXML was “superb”?

For all I know, this was not a blog item. A reader of this site showed me a thread (viewable via Google Groups) where de Icaza spoke about it being “Superb, but…”. He spoke to Simon Phipps (Webmink), IIRC. I soon blogged it here, it created some discussion and, the following day a KDE blog (IIRC) was cited by Slashdot. That’s what got a lot of this chaotic flamewar started and for anyone to ‘accept responsibility’ would be foolish. People can read what was said in context.

The problem with most people bashing Miguel over the whole “OOXML superb” quote haven’t actually read Miguel’s blog post about it and simply saw the sound-bite on Slashdot and reacted in your typical knee-jerk fashion, “lets all hate Miguel! he’s so evil! how could he like OOXML?” blah blah blah.

Your subsequent observations, which involve a criticism of ODF (reflection of Miguel’s opinions), are indicative of the sorts of thing that had Miguel’s interests put to doubt. I’ll get to this in a moment.

The point Miguel was trying to make wrt OOXML was that the OOXML specification was a lot better documented than ODF, which was wildly incomplete.

Is OOXML complete? The answer is a big “No”. OOXML contains operating system-specific elements (Windows), it has proprietary extensions (Jody Goldberg and others love to deny this), it is malstructured, spurious (little or no reuse), and the list of deficiencies goes on and on. I do know a thing or two about OOXML and complete it certainly is not. Technical grounds aside, consider other dimensions of concern such as patents and dynamics (Microsoft is likely to ignore its ECMA standard).

“Do spacing like Word95″, but according to the docs, those tags were also for backward compatibility rather than tags they planned on using going forward.

See, that’s part of the problem. ODF isn’t a case of restoring competition or unfairly stealing market share from Microsoft. That’s just how Microsoft wants to paint this. ODF is a case of properly building a standard that will evolve in a way that honours consumers. For Microsoft, planned obsolescence is the plan, so such poor evolution of formats can also be a mechanism for introducing incompatibilities, i.e. spurring forced upgrades. In Office 2007, equations are already ‘extended’ which makes them unreadable with previous versions of the same software. This had Office 2007 banned by some top-notch publications.

If OOXML requires backward compatibility ‘features’, then Microsoft’s self-made mess is to blame. Other needn’t ‘clean up’ for Microsoft’s deliberate ‘extensions’ (mind last week’s lawsuit from Opera, over the issue of Web standard that Microsoft admittedly ignored).

As a programmer who has himself implemented quite a few specifications over the years, I have to agree with Miguel that more documentation is always better than less (unless it is simply flowery words, but in the case of OOXML, it is not – this isn’t some university student’s term paper with a required minimum number of pages).

I strongly disagree. “Flowery words”, as you call them, is more or less what you find in OOXML. See your remark above about “Do spacing like Word95″.

…pointing out the hypocrisy of the people claiming that ODF is some flawless specification and that OOXML is somehow inferior.

Thank goodness also for the remark from the GNOME Foundation, saying that ODF advocates have betrayed trust. I remain unconvinced and I am happy to discuss this further. In many ways, the GNOME Foundation, just like Novell, seems to be somehow obliged to assist Microsoft. The GNOME Foundation is presently divided over this for a good reason.

The point of this post is that in order to paint Miguel as evil (which this site does quite often), you have to have some pretty poor insight into history and an evil mind of your own in order to draw connections to dots which don’t even exist in reality.

If you have examples of this, please do point them out so that I can correct them. This seems like another attempt to throw a baby out with the bathwater. Vague accusations of inaccuracy is something that we get here more often then detailed comments (the other tactic being a ‘shoot the messenger’ ad hominem one).

First off, Miguel started Mono back in the very early Ximian days (early 2001 or late 2000 iirc), years before his company got bought by Novell, so a conspiracy there is pretty laughable. It should also be noticed that there were other people in the Free Software community interested in implementing .NET for Linux, notably Rhys Weatherly, who was the founder of the Portable.NET (later rolled into DotGNU) project. Then you also had the FSF in collaboration with, I believe, the phpGroupWare project and possibly others, who together formed the DotGNU project which planned to implement the Passport side of .NET. They also tried to get Mono on-board, but I seem to recall that there was a dispute over licensing – Mono wanted to be X11 and DotGNU wanted it to be GPL or some such.

Secondly, Miguel has a history of advocating Linux – go to any of his talks, and he’ll be demoing what can be done on Linux. You’ll never catch him running Windows or MacOS like so many of the “Linux Advocates” that bash him for his views. (note: I imagine Roy runs Linux exclusively, so this doesn’t necessarily apply to Roy himself, but it certainly applies to people like Matt Asay).

Thirdly, while Miguel /did/ interview at Microsoft – he had been writing Free Software for years before that. In fact, that’s even how he was invited in the first place to interview at Microsoft in 1997 – they were looking for someone to help them do a SPARC-port of IE (Miguel had done the SPARC-port for Linux a year or 2 earlier). Seeing as how Microsoft likely would have paid a whole lot better than working as a sysadmin making peanuts per year at UNAM, I don’t think anyone could blame him for accepting an interview.

Now, selfishly, I’m glad the Microsoft job didn’t work out, because he probably would not have been able to continue contributing to Free Software as he has been doing for the past 10 years since.

Fourthly, did you even READ Miguel’s blog post which said that OOXML was “superb”? The problem with most people bashing Miguel over the whole “OOXML superb” quote haven’t actually read Miguel’s blog post about it and simply saw the sound-bite on Slashdot and reacted in your typical knee-jerk fashion, “lets all hate Miguel! he’s so evil! how could he like OOXML?” blah blah blah.

The point Miguel was trying to make wrt OOXML was that the OOXML specification was a lot better documented than ODF, which was wildly incomplete. Now, granted, there were formatting tags with poor documentation like “Do spacing like Word95″, but according to the docs, those tags were also for backward compatibility rather than tags they planned on using going forward.

Depending on how you count, ODF has 4 to 10 pages devoted to it. There is no way you could build a spreadsheet software based on this specification.

To build a spreadsheet program based on ODF you would have to resort to an existing implementation source code (OpenOffice.org, Gnumeric) or you would have to resort to Microsoft’s public documentation or ironically to the OOXML specification.

Roy has stated in the past that “at least people implementing ODF can read OpenOffice’s source code if they need clarification”, but this only holds true if said software is ALSO under a compatible license. If OpenOffice was X11, then we could probably do some magic hand waving and it might actually stick, but OpenOffice is NOT licensed under X11, so proprietary software (or even other open source software whose license is not compat with GPL – e.g. BSD or X11) cannot look at the GPL code for fear of being tainted.

Of course, these projects could use a proxy who reads the source code of OpenOffice and documents it for the developers (e.g. “reverse engineering”), but you can see that there is indeed a problem here, one which the anti-OOXML/pro-ODF people refuse to acknowledge.

By comparison, ODF only references three ISO standards: Relax NG (OOXML also references this one), 639 (language codes) and 3166 (country codes).

Not only it is demanded that OOXML abide by more standards than ISO’s own ODF does, but also that the format used for metafiles from 1999 be used. It seems like it would prevent some nice features developed in the last 8 years for no other reason than “there was a standard for it”.

As Miguel is pointing out here, ODF proponents are a bit hypocritical. I agree with Miguel here, hypocrisy is bad, no matter where it comes from.

I have obviously not read the entire specification, and am biased towards what I have seen in the spreadsheet angle. But considering that it is impossible to implement a spreadsheet program based on ODF, am convinced that the analysis done by those opposing OOXML is incredibly shallow, the burden is on them to prove that ODF is “enough” to implement from scratch alternative applications.

If Microsoft had produced 760 pages (the size of ODF) as the documentation for the “.doc”, “.xls” and “.ppt” that lacked for example the formula specification, wouldn’t people justly complain that the specification was incomplete and was useless?

As a programmer who has himself implemented quite a few specifications over the years, I have to agree with Miguel that more documentation is always better than less (unless it is simply flowery words, but in the case of OOXML, it is not – this isn’t some university student’s term paper with a required minimum number of pages).

As far as I can tell, no-where in his blog does he actually use the word “superb” to describe OOXML at all. His entire blog is simply pointing out that both OOXML and ODF have their fair share of issues and pointing out the hypocrisy of the people claiming that ODF is some flawless specification and that OOXML is somehow inferior.

The point of this post is that in order to paint Miguel as evil (which this site does quite often), you have to have some pretty poor insight into history and an evil mind of your own in order to draw connections to dots which don’t even exist in reality.

For more information:
http://primates.ximian.com/~miguel/gnome-history.html
http://gnu.org.in/pipermail/fsf-friends/2004-November/002493.html

As for Miguel’s pseudo-rebuttal, perhaps it’s time to ask yourself two things :

1) Can you rebutt real examples? I think you can rebutt statements like “we are open and transparent”, but I don’t think you can rebutt real examples.

2) Miguel works for Microsoft (he thinks it’s a pride not to be officially on MS payroll, nevermind the bulk of Novell revenues are a direct influx from MS). But can you guess the retaliation if he said anything negative about this stuff? You have to admit it, he’s got no freedom in speech in that very area, plus Microsoft is using him as a tool to break the open source community apart.

As for the interview he had at Microsoft 10 years ago, it’s a true story (and a widely known one).

How do you know what kind of job-interview he had at Microsoft, anyway? Do you have some sources?

FWIW, OpenSuSE on the desktop has always been “behind” Ubuntu as far as community installs. Ubuntu’s popularity is largely due to Jeff Waugh’s past advocacy.

It’s not worth denying this. A lot of Jeff’s work is commendable.

Eudoxus: you have to understand that the more visitors that this site gets, the more money they make. They know that the more articles they write – especially using very negative language toward Novell, the more money they make (people are drawn to hate and other negative emotional verbiage than positive, it’s human nature).

Worst conspiracy I’ve heard in a while. Other than the fact that I didn’t want these ads (Shane put them up), for all I know they still don’t cover the hosting bills. People who visit this site block ads (that includes me).

It’s also quite clear that at least Roy is very hateful of Miguel de Icaza and other of the Novell engineers and people like Jeff Waugh. He’s also very hateful of some of the projects they work on.

Hateful is a very, very wrong word to use. Cautious — yes. I am very wary of Mono because I know how Microsoft uses Mono (and Wine, among other things) in its patent deals. As for Miguel, some of his remarks and affiliations proved that he had returned to his roots. He went for an interview at Microsoft just weeks before starting GNOME. Luckily for him, having been rejected at the time, he finally got the job he wanted at Microsoft (he gets paid by Novell though).

I wouldn’t mind it much unless it was dividing the world of Free software (KDE and GNOME was a division damaging enough), which is exactly what Microsoft wants (and achieves with these divisive patent deals).

So you have to take the “facts” presented on this site with a grain of salt.

And the news which is fed by promotional press releases likewise. As we’ve seen before, there is a lot of stuff those companies do not tell us. They hope we will not understand.

Eudoxus: you have to understand that the more visitors that this site gets, the more money they make. They know that the more articles they write – especially using very negative language toward Novell, the more money they make (people are drawn to hate and other negative emotional verbiage than positive, it’s human nature).

It’s also quite clear that at least Roy is very hateful of Miguel de Icaza and other of the Novell engineers and people like Jeff Waugh. He’s also very hateful of some of the projects they work on.

So you have to take the “facts” presented on this site with a grain of salt.

Anyway, your anger towards openSUSE is irrational and sick.

There is no anger. Only when it comes to Novell’s management, there’s frustration. It’s not the engineers’ fault.

Good luck, Hittler!

And by Godwin’s Law, this discussion is over.

care to elaborate or enumerate or do you just want to be vague?