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

Re:This is just the first step, why don't we fight

[[cx]]

Globalization crushes poor people, I'm in favor of it.

Re:Doesn't really matter, methinks...

[Tubal-Cain]

...the Internet treats censorship (on MS's part) as damage and will, naturally, route around it.

Ever since the Eternal September started, the Internet has been less inclined to route around technical damage such as IE and .doc

Re:Department of Justice

[mevets]

Can't we add a "+1 Shill" to the moderator options?

Windows 7 will not be a standard desktop OS like V

[Locutus]

why would Microsoft put another desktop OS out there and totally mess up the migration off of XP and on top of that, give them another black eye like Windows ME. Granted, ME was a subset market since Win98 held it's own and Windows 2000 carried the main business user sector so the WinME flop was a consumer issue at best.

From what I see, Windows 7 is going to be the rent-a-Windows kit more to the likes of gOS where it's tied to online services or rental apps. You know, Ozzy's plan now that Gates is out of the way.

But I did get a laugh when it was said that Maine will "hope for the best" with regards to what comes out of Microsoft next. I do think they'll be unpleasantly surprised at what Windows 7 is and probably give GNU/Linux a good look-see as that time approaches. Just my guess. ;-)

LoB

Re:please specify

[Richard W.M. Jones]

Apparently Quickbooks & Quicken run on CrossOver, which was about $100 last time I looked. Almost certainly they now also run on Wine too, since CrossOver usually donate their changes back to Wine every few months.

If you haven't looked at Wine for a few years, I'd definitely recommend doing so. Since the 1.0 release it has really become useful, and seems to have crossed a line where it now runs anything with a few exceptions versus before where it ran only a few exceptional things.

Rich.