Slashdot Mirror
de lcaza calls OOXML a "Superb Standard"
you-bet-it's-not-out-of-context writes "A blogger on KDE Developer's Journal has found an interesting post by Miguel de Icaza, the founder of GNOME and Mono, in a Google group dedicated to the discussion of his blog entries. Six days ago Miguel stated that 'OOXML is a superb standard and yet, it has been FUDed so badly by its competitors that serious people believe that there is something fundamentally wrong with it.' In the same post he says that to avoid patent problems over Silverlight, when using or developing Mono's implementation (known as Moonlight), i's best to 'get/download Moonlight from Novell which will include patent coverage.'"
I know this is a kdawson slashtroll, but does it happen to be true?
Stephane Rodriguez is a FUDster who's pissed that OOXML threatens his business that is based on maintaining others' excel spreadsheets in the old binary format.
His complaint is ludicrous, as he complains that you can't willy-nilly alter XML source without regard to the schema and expect the result to remain a valid document (specifically, he complains that if you alter an excel OOXML document in a particular place, that you must make a corresponding change in another place in order for the document to remain consistent with itself). The argument he puts forward is idiotic. Anyway, Excel does warn you that the document may be corrupt, and gives you the option of letting Excel load the file and rebuild the "corrupt" "out-of-sync" portion.
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
Is Bill Gates giving de Icaza free blow-jobs, or what?
Miguel's love of all things Microsoft has really veered into seriously freaky territory.
He's a shill now. we know from Groklaw that the MS-Novell contract does not cover "copycat" technology. So Openoffice, mono, samba, etc are all "excluded" from patent coverage protection. This would mean that silverlight is neither under the contract (much like GPL 3 is not under the contract for Microsoft) and it is also a "copycat" technology so it's excluded that way.
This is where those Utah mormon guys just don't get it. Like SCO before them, they've made a "deal with the devil" and in 3 years they'll be suing Red Hat because they "own" linux and Unix and Red Hat has been "stealing" from them for the last 15 years. I don't get how anybody can still believe the Microsoft deal makers with their gold fiddles. MS is like Walmart.. they never make a bad deal for THEM. Even when they lose, somebody else under them is made to pay for it. Why the Novell guys and in particular why Miguel in 10 years of Gnome, and Mono and GTK hasn't seen it. The time is to FIGHT, FIGHT, FIGHT. It's not even about "ending" Microsoft, it's more about playing the game down to the Whistle and having more than one "team" to root for... Who'd want to see a Football game where the team is paid to walk off the field in the third quarter? We don't accept that in rather trivial sports like baseball or football... we have congressional hearings about players "maybe" cheating... but we allow business to do anything with thousands of people's livelihoods in the name of "business".
You do know that there is a huge and dedicated group of anti-miguel homeboys on slashdot, don't you? And they tend to have mod points as often as mac fanboys. It also doesn't hurt that talking shit about miguel is almost always insightful if not also informative. The guy's a complete microsoft fanboy troll who's trying to destroy Linux and Free Software in general. Someone should ride him out of town on a rail, rip the rail up, and beat him senseless with it.
The Farewell Tour II
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
You might want to get down from your high horse.
The ECMA group will be in charge of sorting through most of the issues as they work closely with ISO.