Slashdot Mirror

zachlipton writes "Internet World is reporting that initial reports from Office 2003 beta testers don't look good for those hoping to share documents with non-MS systems using the XML file format. Gary Edwards, the OpenOffice.org representative for the OASIS XML file-format group is quoted as saying "although it's still early in the review process, it does look as though XP XML has been so seriously crippled as to be useless to anyone but the big content management and collaboration system providers." Apparently, all formatting and presentation information is removed from the XML. Furthermore, Office's new collaboration featres will only work with users who are also running Office 2003 (requiring Windows 2000 or 2003) that are connecting over XP servers." So Microsoft will continue its efforts to lock-in users with proprietary formats, and hopefully the rest of the world will produce an XML standard document format without them.

Aggrazel passes along a FinancialTimes.com story that would send chills down my spine if I weren't already jaded and bored by such patent nonsense. You mean suits at a megacorp are taking advantage of absurd U.S. intellectual property laws to stifle innovation, quash competition, and steal candy from hard-working programmers? I'm shocked, shocked! Here's the InternetWorld interview: "...virtually everyone out there who indexes the Web is in violation of at least several of those key patents. Q. Does that mean you'll pursue that? A. Yes, we will. Coming up in the first quarter of 2001." Could someone please find out what patents CMGI owns? And in related news, DeadSea notes that the search engine that powers the ODP (dmoz.org) has been released, under the MPL. It's rough around the edges; go thou and smooth it out. While you still can.

caledon wrote in to tell us a story about AltaVista planning a bunch of lawsuits to enforce patents on things like Spidering and Indexing. In the article, David Wetherell of CMGI says "If you index a distributed set of databases-what the Internet is-and even within intranets, corporations, that's one of the patents. We did a press release on this with a list of six or ten of the key areas that the patents cover." I guess patent lawsuits are their best corporate strategy since they no longer can make a good search engine. There's a few other bits in there about CMGI, but who cares about CMGI?

This Internet World article makes some interesting predictions. The first being that Kaffe will end up shaping Java as much as Sun does, and even that Microsoft will end up adopting Kaffe. While that might be a little far out, the second set of predictions are believable: IBM and Compaq may be lining up a ton of software to release as open-source. However, unlike the article I expect it will be go beyond server software. Improving support for Java, existing Xterminal and WinTerminal support will increase the number of users whose GUI is Linux based. By helping make Linux into a fully fledged desktop OS, large vendors' reliance on Microsoft is reduced, increasing the ability of their own software departments to compete without being constrained by undocumented APIs, and the like. I'll make the bold prediction that by 2000 Linux will be a very strong desktop contender, with some desktop features Windows 2000 does not have.

Snoop Baron writes " The Java Lobby is holding a poll on their front page along with a discussion thread on the question: Should Sun make Java open source? Expect a lot of Java stories next week as the Java Business Expo starts on Monday. Of particular interest are the Java World awards, where many products that run on Linux are finalists: IBM Research's Jikes, Tower J's fast commercial native Java compiler, the GPL'd Kaffe VM, Metroworks' IDE (soon), JDK 1.2 (soon). It's interesting how stong IBM's showing is with 7 entries beating Sun's 5.

Redhat's president Bob Young argues in an Internet World article that Java has not taken off, because it is not Open Source. Apparently the remedy for Redhat Linux will be including the latest version of Kaffe. With Kaffe and Jikes the ground would be covered. Let's just help and hope.

John Hartnup writes " Apache Week links to this article about blueprints for Netscape-as-Open-Source. I thought you'd like to know, since it uses Linux as a case study, but falls over itself to find disadvantages, without mentioning many of the advantages... in fact the worst thing they can say about Linux is that there are two versions of Emacs!! A king among non-seqs..." Terrible. two versions of Emacs. How terrible it must be to have a choice.

This Article has quotes from Deja News founder Steve Madere on Linux. He speaks the truth:It's faster, less bloated, and x86 hardware is cheaper. That's the priceless combination that keeps us coming back for more. Thanks to Jorge Forte for sending this one our way.

The latest surveys are in about the number of Internet users. Funny-whenever I read these reports, all I think about is my stats class, and standard deviation of the norm.