Desktop platforms Toolkit

Story: Microsoft licences too expensive, say schools

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MS file formats are the landmine buried for the kids here. MS has had worked hard to maintain an egregious track record in interoperability, especially when it comes to providing documentation for it's APIs and formats to its competitors, even when the courts so order it.

The new formats in the pipeline, like MOOX, show even less promise. That one in particular is just a skeletal framework with the real activity *still* occuring only through MS' undocumented, patented, proprietary extensions.

MS has also a history of poor support for its older formats and to use minor incompatibilities in new formats to drive new purchases.That means that the kids' and the schools' files become obsolete and eventually unreadable over time, even if the physical media survives. The way around that is to only sign with vendors which do support open international formats
that *are* documented.

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