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ODF Alliance Warns Governments About Office 2007 ODF Support
omz writes "The ODF Alliance has prepared a Fact Sheet for governments and others interested in how Microsoft's SP2 for Office 2007 handles ODF. The report revealed 'serious shortcomings that, left unaddressed, would break the open standards based interoperability that the marketplace, especially governments, is demanding.'"
For a commercial vendor, GPL licensed code is not "open" or "available" at all.
No, but BSD licensed code is and MS has already incorporated BSD code into several of their important products (TCP/IP stack for Windows for example). There exists a BSD licensed plug-in for MSOffice which MS helped to fund the creation of, but they somehow managed to make their new implementation incompatible with that plug-in and every other implementation.
They have to code it to the spec, and code to the spec they did.
Excepting, of course, that complying with the spec does not mean crap when it comes to antitrust law. Complying with the letter of the spec while still being incompatible with every competitor when such compliance is not difficult, is still leveraging their monopoly influence to harm competition and artificially break competing products... but then when did MS ever have scruples about breaking antitrust law.
How is it their fault that the spec is busted?
They broke the spec. They didn't test to make sure they are compatible. They failed at a task even small hobbyist projects managed. They did so in a way that harms competition because they are so dominant in that market. That is 100% their fault.