Microsoft Bids To Take Over Open Document Format

what about sends in a Groklaw alert warning that, by PJ's reading, Microsoft may be trying to take over ODF via a stacked SC 34 committee. The article lists the attendees at an SC 34 meeting in July and gives their affiliations, which the official meeting materials do not. (The attendees of the October 1 meeting, which generated a takeover proposal to OASIS, are not known in full.) "Why do I say Microsoft, when this is SC 34? Look at this ... list of participants in the July meeting in Japan of the SC 34 committee. The committee membership is so tilted by Microsoft employees and such, if it were a boat, it would capsize ... Of the 19 attendees, 8 are outright Microsoft employees or consultants, and 2 of them are Ecma TC45 members. So 10 out of 19 are directly controlled by Microsoft/Ecma ... [I]f the takeover were to succeed, SC 34 would get to maintain ODF as well as Microsoft's competing parody 'standard,' OOXML. How totally smooth and shark-like. Under the guise of 'synchronized maintenance,' without which they claim SC 34 can't fulfill its responsibilities, they get control of everything." A related submission from David Gerard points out that BoycottNovell has leaked the ISO OOXML documents, which ISO has kept behind passwords.

Comments

Super slimy.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Let me get this straight:
Sit pouting on the sidelines during ODF standardization
Complain that ODF lacks all kinds of OMG Necessary! features
Hack together your own bloated abortion of a format.
Lie, cheat, and steal your way to its ratification as a standard, never mind that it duplicates functionality of an existing standard, and is of severly troubled quality.
And now: Demand to be placed in charge of maintaining the first standard?

Anything I missed?

Exmbrace, extend, extinguish

[Adrian Lopez]

Microsoft must be truly scared by the prospect of widespread adoption of open source office software. The question now is, what can the open source community do to prevent another OOXML-type situation? How will interested parties prevent Microsoft from engaging in its usual "embrace, extend and extinguish" behavior?

Department of Justice

[Enderandrew]

Honestly, PJ should forward all data related to the ISO/OOXML scandal and these latest actions to the DoJ and request they open another antitrust case. I'm not sure there has ever been a more clear-cut case of anti-competitive behavior from MS.

Re:Hold 'em, fold 'em.

[jd]

We laugh at AlexH for thinking that because a bug existed in a calculation, it should be specified and mandated that all future calculations contain the same bug, in case people corrected for it?

Or perhaps at Microsoft for creating non-existent dates.

Or at ISO for creating one of the worst backlashes against a standard I think I have ever seen through their inept handling of the crisis and their blatant disregard for their own procedures.

Or at ODF's board for their suicidal willingness to allow the makers of a competing standard dictate their own direction. (Even if ODF survives - and no guarantee of that - AlexH has already made it clear that the bugs present in OOXML are being deliberately introduced into ODF for "backwards-compatibility" reasons. If ODF becomes a re-implementation of OOXML, who is going to use ODF?)