It sounds more like Xandros is paying for or buying protection to MS. In fact the article goes into quite a bit of emphasis about that fact. So what's with the screwed up title?
All Microsoft has to disclose is the patent. They don't have to disclose any 'source code.'
You misread the parent post. M$ doesn't necessarily have to disclose its source code. It does however have to identify the allegedly infringing parts of the Linux kernel (and other open source)
, and that means identifying code. And no the onus is not on the developers to do that. It's M$ who must point out where the other programs infringe on the software patents.
Furthermore, for any law suits to start, M$ must also identify the specific software patents involved. The value seems to be in the bluff. Even just naming the software patents would let all the steam out of the FUD-storm.
No, I think it has to do with the fact that more and more governments are requiring ODF to be adopted.
MS was scared by this, as Office wasn't designed around it...
It doesn't matter whether MS office was designed around it or not. A while back MS own PR types where blowing a lot of smoke about how MS Office could support arbitrary XML schemas. If that is even remotely, true, then ODF is more or less a drop-in replacement for whichever undocumented file format MS is peddling this week. If it's not true, then MS has been making some rather false claims about the capabilities of its office products.
I currently work for a judge and he refuses to have a computer in his chambers. Well, ok... there is a computer in his chambers but its unplugged and in the corner, with the screen facing the wall. His secretary prints out his email for him and he dictates his replies onto tape.
That's probably smarter than it appears at first. If he knows little about computers, someone probably foisted MS Windows on him. If it's got MS Windows, is powered on and connected to the net, then it's cracked. (Physical access works, too.)
Average time to Total 0wn3rsh1p in 2007 : < 20 minutes
Average time to Total 0wn3rsh1p in 2004 : < 16 minutes
etc.
If it's cracked and if there is a microphone, discussions in his chambers can be easily followed.
This is exactly the scenario that was used in EU-level negotiations in recent years, so it's not just a hypothetical situation.
I suspect that Samba would be largely immune, as a good chunk of it comes from the olden days of the IBM-Microsoft alliance, and thus is likely under IBM's shield.
However, the issue at hand is one of software patents not copyright. So the origin of the code does not come into the equation for even a second. It doesn't matter where the code came from either, that's copyright, too. What matters with software patents is only what the user is doing with the code.
There are other ways to know that M$ is out after Samba. First off, if M$ had obeyed any of the court decisions and published info on CIFS, then Samba would have been completed long ago. Following that, Samba has had a lot of work to figure out how the protocol works, and work is much harder for version 2 since M$ engineers were told to "fuck with Samba". That's a quote from the interview, so pardon my French. IIRC the quote's about 40 minutes or so into the interview. There's a lot of unfortunate banter, but otherwise an interesting interview.
AD is still just LDAP with a schema and some tools. They can patent try to patent that all they want, there is scads of prior art. It's only distantly based on LDAP. In regards to having something interoperable or scalable, AD falls flat. However: It's Not A Bug, It's A Feature (tm) and those "features" are likely what have been software patented by M$ to prevent other companies, or for that matter any competitor, from plugging in AD clients or servers.
That's heartening. However, as stupid as it sounds, the patent itself will be seen by many as being proof of invention. Even if there is pre-existing published material, as is probably the case in 99.99% of the software patents granted, one still has to afford to go to court long enough to get the patent overturned.
So if M$, or any other political party for that matter, files and receives a couple hundred software patents per year for a decade or so, who will pay the lawyer bills for the overturned patents? The figures I saw a few years back indicated an average cost of about $4 000 000 USD per software patent, with no mention of the lost staff hours (specialists key/staff can't be replaced, burnout of said specialists, etc). If there's no punishment for junk patents, such as paying the whole cost of the case, then there is no disincentive to churn out as many software patents as is administratively possible in as short as time as possible, which is what seems to be the case with M$ here.
Besides, any given computer program or activity is probably going to be treading on several patents. According this bit of FUD from the article, anyone running the linux kernel for any purpose is in violation of 280+ M$ special, super secret software patents. Passing a hat and hoping 4x10^6 people put in a dollar 280 times won't likely work. Better to pass the had and buy some more sensible laws for the US.
For material not published on paper or any other less transient medium, proof of having been published will be harder. A lot of web sites from the 1990's are not around any more, nor are many FTP archives from the 1990's let alone 1980's.
Well, seeing as how MS has (in the US) a software patent on XML serialization, it's any XML-based format that infringes. Even OpenDocument (ODF's) main contender, China's UOF falls foul of that one.
Basically, MS and its minions have been going through old comp sci text books, RFCs and established best practices and running a copy of everything found off to the USPTO for a rubberstamp. After that, any user caught using the softwarepatented item in a way outside of the official party line can get special treatment and bleed to death in court or knuckle under and assume the position.
The easy way out is to roll back to more sensible legislation like Europe currently has so that algorithms, formulas, software, and business methods, literature plots and so on are not eligible for patents. The hard way would be to fight each patent on a case by case basis, and there's not enough money in the world to be able to do that, not to mention the decades it would take.
Yes, bludgeoned.
Bludgeoned from two directions. One from the constant flow of press releases dressed up as reviews, the shills and sock puppets hitting the web, and astroturfing that goes on. I can't think of the last year I saw a decent software review of any kind in a commercial publication. Two from the exclusive arrangements with OEMs. These were done originally with illegal conditions in the contracts with OEMs, later replaced by legally different but functionally equivalent "advertising partnership"
Linux? Don't start with the trolling. There is no mention of linux, solaris, bsd, netware, os/2, os x, plan 9, unix, dr-dos, pc-dos or cpm/m anywhere in my post. However, since you did bring up Apple's 30+ year history, it might be interesting to note that the Microsoft Effect is being overcome to a certain extent as evidenced by a doubling of surfers using Mac OS X in the last eight months.
"question: What keeps the most important and powerful communication tool since the telephone from being universally embraced?"
Maybe it's because, at the end of the day, both computer hardware and software are generally troublesome pieces of shit.
Or to say it more concisely: Microsoft
Gates and co have worked their darndest to make bad engineering acceptable. Because their shoddy workmanship is so visible, this effect has spilled over into areas outside of MS specific domain.
Like it or not, MS has bludgeoned the masses into perceiving MS == computers. Like it or not, MS is known for shoddy products. Combine the two and you get computer viruses and not MS Windows ® viruses, e-mail viruses and not MS Outlook ® viruses, database worms and not MS SQL Server ® worms, security holes and not MS Internet Explorer security holes, and so on. Then there are all the intentional screw ups with forced technological obsolescence through undocumented, ever-changing data formats, digital restrictions, compatibility problems stemming from the Embrace-Extend-Extinguish strategy, and lastly fatigue from constant media bombardment as part of the Saturate-Diffuse-Confuse strategy.
Shoot. Even spam is now caused by Microsoft nowadays. Now that open relays are only a memory from decades past, spam is the result of compromised MS machines. It's to the point where these bot nets are bought, traded and fought over. Get rid of MS, you get rid of spam. However, going back to MS == computers, most people wrongly perceive that spam is an inherent part of computing.
The Microsoft Effect is sort of a variation of sour grapes. People got burned and don't want to admit they got ripped off or bought a lemon. Rather than check out quality options, it's simply easier and more comfortable to throw good money after bad and convince themselves that all other products suck as badly.
Thus you get the public perception that all electronic devices are crap. The problem is compounded by manufacturers cutting back on quality and service.
I have recently been engaged in a serious effort to learn about Solaris 10, and have been very pleasantly surprised at what I have found...
...In fact, I am right now thinking that Solaris offers a lot of technologies that Linux can't touch...
Could you point out some of them? I used to use Solaris a lot, a long time ago, but that was never as a system administrator. It was rather good then, but over the last 7 years I've moved to linux, OS X and OpenBSD. Last time I used Solaris for work was in 2003. What's better with Solaris these days?
dtrace, if I (mis-)understand correctly, is mainly useful for kernel work and is available on other platforms. What other uses might there be, if any?
zfs seems to have some kind of RAID capabilities, but last I heard can't be used as the root file system.
zones seem intriguing, but a cursory examination does make it stand out over other virtualization / paravirtualization methods.
If Ian Murdock is able to get Sun to adopt apt, that would bring me and a lot of others in again. If they can make the install as easy as Debian or Ubuntu, then that will pull in a lot of the curious: as of a few weeks ago the installation process required a serious time commitment and patience.
The fact is, children require sacrifice, and when given the option many people will just avoid sacrificing.
Actually, not always. The groups that breed like cockroaches don't necessarily invest heavily or even much in their offspring. r-K selection is an aspect of natural selection described by one of two extremes. In an r scenario, high volume, high churn is the name of the game: produce as many as fast as possible and some will live to reproduce. In a K scenario, emphasis is on a longer development and is more useful in a more stable environment: produce only a few, but make sure they're really good.
It's not profitable and appears to serve only as a pilot for DRM'd hardware. Until we see some auditable numbers, we can guess that the smoke and mirrors are to distract from the case that MS VIsta's not going anywhere.
It would make a lot of sense to spin off MS Office as a separate company. Detached from the main political movement, they'd then be free to do what is profitable rather than what is political. Who knows, but I expect we would see MS Office for Ubuntu from that as well as OpenDocument support.
Happy World Intellectual Property Day! April 26th, a day to remember forever! It's also the anniversary of the start of the Chernobyl disaster. Coincidence? You decide.;)
Great, but in the interest of reaching the largest possible audience, how about posting at least an alternate copy of the presentation in a less insecure and more interoperable format like ODF or PDF. Both do presentations and since the main beef is about USSR-like control, using PDF or ODF would be putting money where the mouth is -- both are published, open standards.
Well considering that software patents are forbidden in EU, I don't see why EU should take the number of patents MS owns as a metric for innovation. Because the whole things is just footdragging and delay. Throwing swpatents into the discussion just generates confusion and draws the debate off focus and away from MS failure to comply with European court decisions...
Like it or not, MSIE is not the standard. Like anything else MS coughs up, it has many different versions that behave very differently. So, to cover MSIE is in effect covering a half-dozen incompatible quirks.
People I know that still do web applications simple code to standard XHTML + CSS and then add CSS tweaks as needed for MSIE if there are complaints.
Anyway, it's been years since I've run into a site that requires or claims to require MSIE. If there are any sites locked into MS, it would be interesting to hear what kind of rationalization is going on in the minds of the developers or their managers. While we're asking, what color is the sky on their planet and how is the beer?
... and was told that if the other browser users can't access the site, then put up a sign on the front page saying IE required.
Your boss is basically telling these potential customers to fuck off and take their money elsewhere. No one wins an argument with a customer. It's not a new concept.
{MS} Outlook and {MS} Exchange comprise a killer app for a lot of organizations.
That phrase doesn't mean what you seem to think it means. Yes, MS Outlook and MS Exchange is killing lots of organizations. Most shops that go suckered into MS Exchange/MS Outlook by a hit and run manager are stuck with it and with running a MS Windows computer just for e-mail along side their workstation. It's like a slow memory leak, except in your budget and staffing rather than your RAM. You get not only your lost and delayed mail, but lots of server down time, high licensing and maintenance costs, and both are major vectors for malware. Even die-hard Gates catamites readily admit that it doesn't communicate well with mail servers. It's so thoroughly tied to the MS Windows platform, with all the costs and problems that entails, that there's no hope of integrating it into a high tech environment.
Conventionally, killer app instead refers to a must-have application which launches wide-scale popular interest in a particular technology. For example, for the microcomputer, that killer app was the spread sheet. VisiCalc and then Lotus 1-2-3 got a microcomputer into each and every business. For the Internet, it was the graphical web browser, first Mosaic, then Netscape.
Though within research and academia, I'd say that e-mail was the killer app for the Internet. That's why Thunderbird is so crucial. Many have gotten their first (and unpleasant) experience with the problems that are part and parcel of MS Outlook that an app that makes e-mail useful again is being sought after. No wonder that Thunderbird is taking off.
... of course the.doc format will remain the default, making it a pain in the butt to use...
Except that ".doc" is neither a single format nor are any of them documented. The extension, of course is the same all these years, but changes both big and small make each new version of MS Word format incompatible with older versions of MS Office, thus forcing another round of purchases.
... financing education we will spend tax dollars on policing students, in order to save a dying industry?...
It doesn't appear to be about policing but oriented toward technological 'solutions'. Basically it appears a way of mandating DRM, perhaps M$ DRM, into all the classrooms at taxpayer expense.
I have a better idea. Let's disband the RIAA and each of it's members, selling off the assets for Pell grants and interest-free study loans.
Let's extend this just a little farther: How about being able to choose your word processor or spreadsheet tool of choice and not having to be concerned about file formats.
That's why about two dozen companies, businesses, universities and agencies got together about five years ago to hammer out a universal office format. Since then, about five dozen are actively involved in the development and the initial review involved about 600. Last year, this universal office format was accepted and published by the International Organization for Standards as ISO/IEC 26300.
A universal document for hypertext documents (HTML) has proven highly beneficial and profitable, to say the least. It's not hard to imagine similar gains from having a universal document format for office formats.
As I said, the process took five years. M$ was invited to participate early on and could, if its management decided to, still start participating or even using the standard any time. Top engineers in the company have gone on record saying that there are no technical barriers to implementing ISO/IEC 26300 and that it would be rather straight forward to do so. You connect the dots.
The only serious contender against ISO/IEC 26300 has been China's Uniform Office Format. However, the two groups have been working actively to harmonize the specifications.
Slashdot Mirror
It sounds more like Xandros is paying for or buying protection to MS. In fact the article goes into quite a bit of emphasis about that fact. So what's with the screwed up title?
You misread the parent post. M$ doesn't necessarily have to disclose its source code. It does however have to identify the allegedly infringing parts of the Linux kernel (and other open source) , and that means identifying code. And no the onus is not on the developers to do that. It's M$ who must point out where the other programs infringe on the software patents.
Furthermore, for any law suits to start, M$ must also identify the specific software patents involved. The value seems to be in the bluff. Even just naming the software patents would let all the steam out of the FUD-storm.
MS was scared by this, as Office wasn't designed around it
It doesn't matter whether MS office was designed around it or not. A while back MS own PR types where blowing a lot of smoke about how MS Office could support arbitrary XML schemas. If that is even remotely, true, then ODF is more or less a drop-in replacement for whichever undocumented file format MS is peddling this week. If it's not true, then MS has been making some rather false claims about the capabilities of its office products.
That's probably smarter than it appears at first. If he knows little about computers, someone probably foisted MS Windows on him. If it's got MS Windows, is powered on and connected to the net, then it's cracked. (Physical access works, too.)
If it's cracked and if there is a microphone, discussions in his chambers can be easily followed.
This is exactly the scenario that was used in EU-level negotiations in recent years, so it's not just a hypothetical situation.
However, the issue at hand is one of software patents not copyright. So the origin of the code does not come into the equation for even a second. It doesn't matter where the code came from either, that's copyright, too. What matters with software patents is only what the user is doing with the code.
There are other ways to know that M$ is out after Samba. First off, if M$ had obeyed any of the court decisions and published info on CIFS, then Samba would have been completed long ago. Following that, Samba has had a lot of work to figure out how the protocol works, and work is much harder for version 2 since M$ engineers were told to " fuck with Samba ". That's a quote from the interview, so pardon my French. IIRC the quote's about 40 minutes or so into the interview. There's a lot of unfortunate banter, but otherwise an interesting interview.
Not in the United States. In the U.S., first-to-invent is the rule, not first-to-file.
That's heartening. However, as stupid as it sounds, the patent itself will be seen by many as being proof of invention. Even if there is pre-existing published material, as is probably the case in 99.99% of the software patents granted, one still has to afford to go to court long enough to get the patent overturned.
So if M$, or any other political party for that matter, files and receives a couple hundred software patents per year for a decade or so, who will pay the lawyer bills for the overturned patents? The figures I saw a few years back indicated an average cost of about $4 000 000 USD per software patent, with no mention of the lost staff hours (specialists key/staff can't be replaced, burnout of said specialists, etc). If there's no punishment for junk patents, such as paying the whole cost of the case, then there is no disincentive to churn out as many software patents as is administratively possible in as short as time as possible, which is what seems to be the case with M$ here.
Besides, any given computer program or activity is probably going to be treading on several patents. According this bit of FUD from the article, anyone running the linux kernel for any purpose is in violation of 280+ M$ special, super secret software patents. Passing a hat and hoping 4x10^6 people put in a dollar 280 times won't likely work. Better to pass the had and buy some more sensible laws for the US.
For material not published on paper or any other less transient medium, proof of having been published will be harder. A lot of web sites from the 1990's are not around any more, nor are many FTP archives from the 1990's let alone 1980's.
It's not about creativity or invention, first to file is the rule.
Well, seeing as how MS has (in the US) a software patent on XML serialization, it's any XML-based format that infringes. Even OpenDocument (ODF's) main contender, China's UOF falls foul of that one.
Basically, MS and its minions have been going through old comp sci text books, RFCs and established best practices and running a copy of everything found off to the USPTO for a rubberstamp. After that, any user caught using the softwarepatented item in a way outside of the official party line can get special treatment and bleed to death in court or knuckle under and assume the position.
The easy way out is to roll back to more sensible legislation like Europe currently has so that algorithms, formulas, software, and business methods, literature plots and so on are not eligible for patents. The hard way would be to fight each patent on a case by case basis, and there's not enough money in the world to be able to do that, not to mention the decades it would take.
Yes, bludgeoned. Bludgeoned from two directions. One from the constant flow of press releases dressed up as reviews, the shills and sock puppets hitting the web, and astroturfing that goes on. I can't think of the last year I saw a decent software review of any kind in a commercial publication. Two from the exclusive arrangements with OEMs. These were done originally with illegal conditions in the contracts with OEMs, later replaced by legally different but functionally equivalent "advertising partnership"
Linux? Don't start with the trolling. There is no mention of linux, solaris, bsd, netware, os/2, os x, plan 9, unix, dr-dos, pc-dos or cpm/m anywhere in my post. However, since you did bring up Apple's 30+ year history, it might be interesting to note that the Microsoft Effect is being overcome to a certain extent as evidenced by a doubling of surfers using Mac OS X in the last eight months.
Or to say it more concisely: Microsoft
Gates and co have worked their darndest to make bad engineering acceptable. Because their shoddy workmanship is so visible, this effect has spilled over into areas outside of MS specific domain.
Like it or not, MS has bludgeoned the masses into perceiving MS == computers. Like it or not, MS is known for shoddy products. Combine the two and you get computer viruses and not MS Windows ® viruses, e-mail viruses and not MS Outlook ® viruses, database worms and not MS SQL Server ® worms, security holes and not MS Internet Explorer security holes, and so on. Then there are all the intentional screw ups with forced technological obsolescence through undocumented, ever-changing data formats, digital restrictions, compatibility problems stemming from the Embrace-Extend-Extinguish strategy, and lastly fatigue from constant media bombardment as part of the Saturate-Diffuse-Confuse strategy.
Shoot. Even spam is now caused by Microsoft nowadays. Now that open relays are only a memory from decades past, spam is the result of compromised MS machines. It's to the point where these bot nets are bought, traded and fought over. Get rid of MS, you get rid of spam. However, going back to MS == computers, most people wrongly perceive that spam is an inherent part of computing.
from there ...
The Microsoft Effect is sort of a variation of sour grapes. People got burned and don't want to admit they got ripped off or bought a lemon. Rather than check out quality options, it's simply easier and more comfortable to throw good money after bad and convince themselves that all other products suck as badly.
Thus you get the public perception that all electronic devices are crap. The problem is compounded by manufacturers cutting back on quality and service.
I have recently been engaged in a serious effort to learn about Solaris 10, and have been very pleasantly surprised at what I have found...
...In fact, I am right now thinking that Solaris offers a lot of technologies that Linux can't touch ...
Could you point out some of them? I used to use Solaris a lot, a long time ago, but that was never as a system administrator. It was rather good then, but over the last 7 years I've moved to linux, OS X and OpenBSD. Last time I used Solaris for work was in 2003. What's better with Solaris these days?
dtrace, if I (mis-)understand correctly, is mainly useful for kernel work and is available on other platforms. What other uses might there be, if any?
zfs seems to have some kind of RAID capabilities, but last I heard can't be used as the root file system.
zones seem intriguing, but a cursory examination does make it stand out over other virtualization / paravirtualization methods.
If Ian Murdock is able to get Sun to adopt apt, that would bring me and a lot of others in again. If they can make the install as easy as Debian or Ubuntu, then that will pull in a lot of the curious: as of a few weeks ago the installation process required a serious time commitment and patience.
However, the girl who tried to use the fake id is no longer in possession of it. It's new owner seems to find it fit for publication.
Actually, not always. The groups that breed like cockroaches don't necessarily invest heavily or even much in their offspring. r-K selection is an aspect of natural selection described by one of two extremes. In an r scenario, high volume, high churn is the name of the game: produce as many as fast as possible and some will live to reproduce. In a K scenario, emphasis is on a longer development and is more useful in a more stable environment: produce only a few, but make sure they're really good.
These strategies apply to primates as well.
No. He was right. Kill it.
It's not profitable and appears to serve only as a pilot for DRM'd hardware. Until we see some auditable numbers, we can guess that the smoke and mirrors are to distract from the case that MS VIsta's not going anywhere.
It would make a lot of sense to spin off MS Office as a separate company. Detached from the main political movement, they'd then be free to do what is profitable rather than what is political. Who knows, but I expect we would see MS Office for Ubuntu from that as well as OpenDocument support.
Great, but in the interest of reaching the largest possible audience, how about posting at least an alternate copy of the presentation in a less insecure and more interoperable format like ODF or PDF. Both do presentations and since the main beef is about USSR-like control, using PDF or ODF would be putting money where the mouth is -- both are published, open standards.
Like it or not, MSIE is not the standard. Like anything else MS coughs up, it has many different versions that behave very differently. So, to cover MSIE is in effect covering a half-dozen incompatible quirks.
People I know that still do web applications simple code to standard XHTML + CSS and then add CSS tweaks as needed for MSIE if there are complaints. Anyway, it's been years since I've run into a site that requires or claims to require MSIE. If there are any sites locked into MS, it would be interesting to hear what kind of rationalization is going on in the minds of the developers or their managers. While we're asking, what color is the sky on their planet and how is the beer?
... and was told that if the other browser users can't access the site, then put up a sign on the front page saying IE required.Your boss is basically telling these potential customers to fuck off and take their money elsewhere. No one wins an argument with a customer. It's not a new concept.
That phrase doesn't mean what you seem to think it means. Yes, MS Outlook and MS Exchange is killing lots of organizations. Most shops that go suckered into MS Exchange /MS Outlook by a hit and run manager are stuck with it and with running a MS Windows computer just for e-mail along side their workstation. It's like a slow memory leak, except in your budget and staffing rather than your RAM. You get not only your lost and delayed mail, but lots of server down time, high licensing and maintenance costs, and both are major vectors for malware. Even die-hard Gates catamites readily admit that it doesn't communicate well with mail servers. It's so thoroughly tied to the MS Windows platform, with all the costs and problems that entails, that there's no hope of integrating it into a high tech environment.
Conventionally, killer app instead refers to a must-have application which launches wide-scale popular interest in a particular technology. For example, for the microcomputer, that killer app was the spread sheet. VisiCalc and then Lotus 1-2-3 got a microcomputer into each and every business. For the Internet, it was the graphical web browser, first Mosaic, then Netscape.
Though within research and academia, I'd say that e-mail was the killer app for the Internet. That's why Thunderbird is so crucial. Many have gotten their first (and unpleasant) experience with the problems that are part and parcel of MS Outlook that an app that makes e-mail useful again is being sought after. No wonder that Thunderbird is taking off.
... of course theExcept that ".doc" is neither a single format nor are any of them documented. The extension, of course is the same all these years, but changes both big and small make each new version of MS Word format incompatible with older versions of MS Office, thus forcing another round of purchases.
... financing education we will spend tax dollars on policing students, in order to save a dying industry?It doesn't appear to be about policing but oriented toward technological 'solutions'. Basically it appears a way of mandating DRM, perhaps M$ DRM, into all the classrooms at taxpayer expense.
I have a better idea. Let's disband the RIAA and each of it's members, selling off the assets for Pell grants and interest-free study loans.
That's why about two dozen companies, businesses, universities and agencies got together about five years ago to hammer out a universal office format. Since then, about five dozen are actively involved in the development and the initial review involved about 600. Last year, this universal office format was accepted and published by the International Organization for Standards as ISO/IEC 26300.
A universal document for hypertext documents (HTML) has proven highly beneficial and profitable, to say the least. It's not hard to imagine similar gains from having a universal document format for office formats.
As I said, the process took five years. M$ was invited to participate early on and could, if its management decided to, still start participating or even using the standard any time. Top engineers in the company have gone on record saying that there are no technical barriers to implementing ISO/IEC 26300 and that it would be rather straight forward to do so. You connect the dots.
The only serious contender against ISO/IEC 26300 has been China's Uniform Office Format. However, the two groups have been working actively to harmonize the specifications.
Yeah. It's easy. Just start here or here.