Microsoft Receives Open Source VIP Blessing

* * Beatles-Beatles writes to let us know that Larry Rosen has given his blessing to the new terms that Microsoft is Making their Office XML Reference Schema available under. Rosen, "the attorney that wrote the book on open source licensing and the man who was the Open Source Initiative's first general counsel and secretary," described this move as the "most significant olive branch to date" to come from the Redmond software giant.

Comments

Submitter is a link spammer-stop posting his stuff

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm recycling a comment from another AC in another Scuttlemonkey/**Beatles-Beatles post. This guy's getting worse than Roland Picklepail:

Am I the only person who has noticed the numerous stories that get posted by *--Beatles-Beatles? Am I also the only person who has noticed that the link used in is name is a constantly changing URL (depending on the story) with pointers to various scammy sites? Is it not obvious what he's doing? He's using the awesome PageRank of slashdot do promote his sites based on searches that have the word Beatles in them.

It's a small price to pay for free advertising. Find a story, summarize it in 5 minutes, post to slashdot, and get a pagerank boost that advertisers would pay hundreds (or maybe thousands) for. (Text links on high-ranking sites is big business - just ask oreilly).

Slashdot should at least put a ref=nofollow in the links to submitters (or better yet, only link the submitter's name to his/her user page).

In closing, a quick bit of WHOIS shows that all the sites linked by **B-B are registered to Carl Fogle. Carl, cut this crap out.

Back in Mass.

[DrEldarion]

This move has put Microsoft back in the race in Massachusetts. They were previously threatening to disqualify MS due to not supporting any standards.

Re:Back in Mass.

[rmstar]

By promising to open their standard they have made a fairly dramatic political move. They are doing quite a bit of stuff lately that makes me think that they are very desperate.

Re:Back in Mass.

[indifferent children]

Or maybe the government IT folks in Massachusets think that a format designed to be open and interoperable will be a better format than one that was designed to serve the interests of one corporation. Those crazy kids.

Re:Submitter is a link spammer-stop posting his st

[Tom]

Who cares?

I do, and apparently many others. The problem isn't one guy posting stuff with links to his various websites. That's ok.

The problem is a potential collaboration between this guy and a /. editor. Maybe he's providing content, but maybe 20 other people provide the same content and are rejected in favour of this guy. Maybe Scuttlemonkey even gets a small kickback for favouring him.

And that's where it crosses the line. It certainly is interesting to see that all of his postings were approved by Scuttlemonkey. Coincidence? Maybe. Maybe not.

Re:Here is a dumb thought

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Here is a dumb thought...
Don't click on his|her link.

Except it doesn't matter whether anyone here clicks on the link, google's pagerank system is the one "clicking on the link" - the end result being an increase in the guy's ranking in google so that people who don't even know what slashdot is will see the guy's site come up in searches for "beatles" and they will click on the link through google instead.

Maybe we need to grow up

[shis-ka-bob]

Standards are not fun. Try reading standards for mundane things like nuts and bolts. Besides the obvious pitch and diameter, there are all sorts of standards for the profiles of each thread, the metals that are to be used, how the strength of the screw is to be determined, and so on. Even in the 'obvious' features like diameter and pitch, don't you suppose that there needs to be an agreed upon margin of error? The standards are dry as the Sahara, but I'm really glad that I don't have to worry about having to get nuts and bolts from the same batch or even from the same manufacturer.

Why should software be different than nuts and bolts? Large detailed standards are not a bad thing. Now, if you can show that ODF is poorly designed compared with Microsoft's format, then I will listen. From the review of the two formats on Groklaw, I am actually inclined to prefer ODF to Microsoft's Office XML. ODF uses XLink, rather than reinventing that wheel, and ODF allows for mixed content (text and tags within the same parent tag) just like (X)HTML.