Enterprise open source Toolkit

Story: Open source awareness growing in Scotland

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On open formats: No, YOU learn to read!
In contrast to you, he said it very well: on the surface, Microsoft going XML sounds like the real thing, whereas beyond that, you can discover that it's all patented to legally prevent the overly competitive competition from establishing full file format compatibility.
Plus, with Digital Restrictions Management mechanisms finding their way into Microsoft file formats, it will be even harder to continue to provide compatibility to Microsoft formats.
In short, anybody who will keep using new Microsoft file formats without having very urgent reasons for doing so is a fool. People should convert to very useful alternatives such as OpenOffice in droves.

Your comment has clearly been an attempt at astroturfing and muddying waters.

The part about Open Source and open formats is valid, though: if those governments were doing ONE SINGLE DEAD SIMPLE THING, namely requesting that commonly used file formats HAVE to be openly documented and usable, there wouldn't be any need to demand the use of Open Source software, since all software no matter whether proprietary or not would be able to read/write the same format, thus we'd have the perfect software market. Alas, politicians really don't know what they do or have been bribed properly to not "know" any more what should be done...

Since it would fully suffice for even only one single government to demand open format specifications, yet not a single government has followed through on that so far, I strongly suspect strong Microsoft involvement to prevent such a catastrophic event. Oh well, the old game: Microsoft not leading through innovation and useful software, but instead through intimidation, LIES and lawsuits. And all customers buying this crap hook, line and sinker...

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