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GNOME Foundation Helping OOXML?
christian.einfeldt writes "According to long-time OpenDocument Fellowship member Russell Ossendryver, it appears that GNOME founder Miguel de Icaza's widely-publicized praise for OOXML as a 'superb standard' is being followed up with on-going support by the GNOME Foundation in 'resolving' the thousands of criticisms leveled against Microsoft's proposed standard. In an open letter in his blog, Ossendryver urges the GNOME Foundation to halt its apparent support for OOXML as a standard and to put its efforts behind enhancing adoption of the genuinely open standard, ODF, which was approved by the world standards bodies as ISO/IEC standard 26300 on 2 May 2006."
I was just about to say something closely approximating that.
What annoyed me most before this (which is simply unthinkable) was his extremely strong support of Mono. Personally, I feel that Mono, like Wine, should be treated as a compatibility layer to run software intended for other operating systems, not a viable target for open-source application developers. If everyone likes C# so much, then we should take matters into our own hands and implement a language with the features we like that is under our control! (My concern with Mono following Microsoft's language is that in the event that Microsoft changes a significant feature, like Java did when it added assert, Mono would almost certainly make the same change, leaving a bunch of open-source developers to deal with the whims of Microsoft.)
At some point, until Microsoft starts releasing truly open-source code and letting everyone hack on Windows, we have to keep at least some distance from Microsoft. There's nothing wrong with attempting to run their software, but we shouldn't be writing Windows software just because it's more convenient and we now have a way to run it on Linux.
ttuttle is a rankmaniac
The article author is either stupid beyond belief or deliberately trying to cause spite and malice. Neither GNOME the project, nor The GNOME Foundation is in any way or form backing OOXML! Miguel de Icaza is, but most other foundation members are staunchly against it. Not that it matters, there is a big fucking difference between individuals opinions and the stance of an organization. If the author has some beef with de Icaza, then he should say so, but don't try to paint the GNOME Foundation with the same brush. Fucking moron troll.
Football Odds
But I wouldn't be surprised. Mr. Miguel de Icaza has been very clear about his love for Microsoft and "their" technologies. I never actually hear him choosing community technologies to boast, but maybe that is just due to bias reporting. Either way, it will be interesting to see his reaction if think ever really go bad. I'd also be interested in hearing his opinion on the recent law suit against RedHat.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
Miguel has stated why he likes OOXML: it's easy to take an existing Microsoft Word reader/writer and turn it into an OOXML reader/writer, because the file structures are so similar. That makes transitioning existing Microsoft-compatible software to OOXML much easier than transitioning to ODF.
That's a reasonable position. I still think it's wrong.
The purpose of an XML document format is to enable other people to do interesting things with the format, not to make life easy for the few people porting existing Microsoft Word compatible software. Furthermore, open source projects need to support ODF anyway because ODF is here and it's here to stay.
For all I know, they offered him a better job outside Microsoft for a nice thirty pieces of silver collectible at some future date. Every time I read his name, it's in connection with something I see as damaging to Linux and the Free Software movement. And surely nobody can describe OOXML in these terms without some sort of bias?
Gnome is GPL, isn't it? Doesn't that make it inherently possible for people to sideline this person no matter his current position, before we risk serious damage? In terms of patents, introduction of copyrighted code, or perhaps other issues, presumably someone in his position acting deliberately, could cause some nasty legal wrangles. And actions so far give reason for distrust, do they not?
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
He always gets sidelined. He mostly starts something or writes it badly but with some key interesting kernel. The "badly" is usually trying to mimic some underdesigned overengineered buzzword from MS - he seems to be enamoured by their financial success and thinks it is the intrinsic value of their technology that did it. Of course, it isn't - their success is due to acute business acumen and marketing ability.
GNOME (the GNU Network Object Model Environment) was designed around a COM approach (it actually used that well-known failure and DCOM copycat, Corba). Microsoft is abandoning COM, and using it (usually because the financial director told them that it will save money and is better anyway) costs developers a vast amount of time, money, and reputation as the interface conventions are appallingly unstructured. Suffice it to say, GNOME is moving away from corba and has been for some time.
Generally, it is a good idea to watch for what problem Miguel de Icaza wants to solve and then start solving the problem differently before he can damage Linux' reputation for several years until his plans are ripped out and replaced as they usually are.
What surprises me the most is that this actually has to be said. It is ridiculous that mono is so actively used to actually make programs for official gnome, we got python, we got Java, we got Ruby, we certainly did not need MONO here.
I can foresee somebody telling me it is about picking the best tool for the job. But then HOW IN EARTH would MONO be the best tool for this job? The intention is to make open source free software, and adding any unnecessary dependance on MS technology is ridiculous, and it is really making gnome look bad, I actually hope KDE4 lives to the expectations so I can move. Really.
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"