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Weigh In On the OOXML Issue During Live Debate
lisah writes "Linux.com's Robin 'Roblimo' Miller will moderate a live debate today, Wednesday, December 5 at 1pm US EST (GMT -5), between the GNOME Foundation's press officer Jeff Waugh and fair competition advocate Roy Schestowitz. Both have strong — and opposing — points of view regarding GNOME's involvement with Microsoft's OOXML standard and vehemently defend their positions, so getting them together in the same virtual room ought to prove quite interesting. Although the broadcast will be archived as a podcast and available for free download, you can listen live as it's recorded and also call in to participate and ask questions."
No it doesn't
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
Of course, the problem with your comments is that the GNOME Foundation **doesn't** contribute to or endorse OOXML... We're drilling Microsoft for documentation, so we can make sure FLOSS products (not just GNOME products) can interoperate with it. In terms of conspiracy theories, that's not very potent. :-)
There is a very valid point of disagreement: whether engagement will be perceived (or should be perceived) as support, and whether Microsoft will try to do that themselves. I hope that as a community, we can agree to disagree in circumstances such as this, without demonising community participants in the process. Sadly, the black-and-white community outcry has done more to support the idea that "GNOME supports OOXML" than Microsoft have so far.
From our perspective, our goal here is about SOFTWARE FREEDOM. Making sure that we can interoperate with Microsoft products so that users are able to adopt FLOSS products without cutting off access to their old documents or interrupting co-operation with their friends or colleagues.
Everything in the software world is patent infested, but in this case the Microsoft Open Specification Promise covers OOXML 1.0. It may not cover future versions, you may not trust them, but there it is. I am less concerned about Microsoft-owned patents than those owned by patent trolls. We're actually in a similar position to Microsoft on this front.
Microsoft will be in a stronger position if users don't have the opportunity to adopt FLOSS products because they don't interoperate with existing documents (including those of their friends and work colleagues). OpenOffice.org has been a success not just because it's "good enough" and "cheap", but because users don't have to drop everything to use it. If OpenOffice.org didn't support the binary Microsoft document formats, the barrier to entry would be way too high, and no one would bother.
The GNOME Foundation is not contributing to, endorsing, improving or developing OOXML independently or towards ISO standardisation. We are involved in ECMA TC45-M to get as much documentation out of Microsoft as possible. If OOXML is crappy, particularly on the terms of ISO voting bodies, having good documentation only helps to illustrate that crappiness. We're not making it less crap.
No disagreements there!