Enterprise open source Toolkit
Story: Why you should care about Microsoft's open-source move
Microsoft Promise Great News For Hobbyists!
Unfortunely, everybody else is shafted, the Microsoft promises exclude it's greatest competitors. Said promises only protect open source developers for "non commercial distribution", this excludes Linux. They are trying to equate "non commerical" with "open source" and these are distinct concepts. As usual, it's a marketing ploy, and it's no coincidence that it comes just a day or two before national boards will meet in Geneva to discuss MS-OOXML. It adds confusion, there's no time study and digest it, only time to see the headlines that 45 billion dollars in the bank can generate.
If Microsoft was truly sincere about supporting open standards, then adding native support for ODF in its own office package would be a good start. It is an ISO standard after all. I don't think Microsoft Office supported PDF (an ISO standard like ODF) until after OpenOffice.org did. Correct me if I'm wrong. At any rate, Microsoft has a tried and true tradition of failing to support open standards. When finally pressured into doing so, they undermine the standard by "extending" it as with HTML, Java etc.
Or maybe they just try for dueling standards, by vote-rigging, deceit and buying headlines because their so called OOXML (even the name is deceitful) standard probably can't be implemented properly by anybody but Microsoft and I have my doubts there.
Goldie Simmons
Applications Development, Midwest
Member since: January 2008
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