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.'"

Comments

It's a wonderful spec

[overshoot]

Well, I suppose there's room for opinion on that. For instance, Jim Mason seems to think it's a long way from prime time, just as a specification.

Now, to put this in perspective: Jim Mason (of Oak Ridge National Laboratory) isn't on one side or the other, but has been doing document-format specifications for a looooong time -- he was, I believe, the founding chair of SC34 and had a hand in the creation of SGML. The dude knows documents, he knows standards, and when he writes

the submitters obviously did not read -- and edit -- this submission into a consistent whole. If it were coming through the normal ISO process, I'd say it was in the state of a Working Draft and not yet ready for registration as a Committee Draft and assignment of a number

I'm inclined to take his word for it than Miguel's.

Even if it *was* a good standard...

[Anonymous Coward]

Even if we thought that it was a good standard--you know, something that would not contain ugly hacks like formatLikeWord95, would not need a major international company to brib^W cajole hundreds of Microsoft Certified Gold Partners to join NB's that are members of the ISO to get it passed--how does all that backwards compatibility hack^W support actually work in practice?

Well, let's take a look at one company's deployment of Office 2007 to 25,000 workstations. Oh, what's that? It's still crap? Figures.

Yes, the information should help people interoperate with Microsoft. But all the parts they're keeping from us are important. They want to control de facto standards and keep all other ISVs at second-tier status without having to make good products.

People would be better off with standards not controlled by any one company. Even if Microsoft were the most benevolent company in the world, there's no excuse for giving another company the power to hold your documents hostage in this day and age. And it's about time that people realized that, especially when Microsoft has intentionally perverted standards like ACPI to harm Linux.

The PDF link above is just for proof. Here's a transcript of the PDF so you don't have to view it unless you don't believe me:

Plaintiff's Exhibit 3020
Comes v. Microsoft

From: Bill Gates
Sent: Sunday, January 24, 1999 8:41 AM
To: Jeff Weslorinen; Ben Falbi
Cc: Carl Stork (Exchange); Nathan Myhrvold; Eric Rudder
Subject: ACPI extensions

One thing I find myself wondering about is whether we shouldn't try to make the "ACPI" extensions somehow Windows specific.

It seems unfortunate if we do this work and get our partners to do the work and the result is that Linux works great without having to do the work.

Maybe there is no way to avoid this problem but it does bother me.

Maybe we could define the APIs so that they work well with NT and not the others even if they are open.

Or maybe we could patent something related to this.

MS-PCA 1389717
HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL

Gates Deposition Exhibit 32
2/28/02

Re:Novell is distributing concealed patent landmin

[pallmall1]

Well, you quoted my posts out of context(I provided a *lot* of context).

I did provide a link to the blog containing the quoted posts. Perhaps you could explain what I got wrong regarding this:

Moonlight does not have the same policy that Mono does in terms of us working around to remove infringing code. For one, we do not know what it could be (that is how the patent system works) and two we have agreed and have obtained permission from any patents that might exist in Moonlight to implement it.

This policy makes any software released under it a patent trap.