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The final vote will be tallied today, but by most counts, Microsoft got enough votes for OOXML to pass. Until the official report, we have plenty of articles to read about how things went on Friday, and quite a few people in agreement that OOXML standard will tarnish ISO.
Groklaw covers what it calls “irregularities” in the voting process in Germany, Norway, and Croatia: » Read more
Rob Weir has a great objective comparison of ODF and OOXML. He created word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation graphics, each in OOXML and ODF formats. He presents a table comparing how each of the formats treated the very simple request for red, right-aligned text. Weir concludes:
The results speak for themselves.
What is the engineering justification for this horror? I have no doubt that this accurately reflects the internals of Microsoft Office, and shows how these three applications have been developed by three different, isolated teams. But is this a suitable foundation for an International Standard? Does this represent a reasonable engineering judgment? ODF uses the W3C’s XSL-FO vocabulary for text styling, and uses this vocabulary consistently. OOXML’s representation, on the other hand, appear incompatible with any deliberate design methodology.
Microsoft’s Open Specification Promise: No Assurance for GPL - Software Freedom Law Center
There has been much discussion in the free software community and in the press about the inadequacy of Microsoft’s Office Open XML (OOXML) as a standard, including good analysis of some of the shortcomings of Microsoft’s Open Specification Promise (OSP), a promise that is supposed to protect projects from patent risk. Nonetheless, following the close of the ISO-BRM meeting in Geneva, SFLC’s clients and colleagues have continued to express uncertainty as to whether the OSP would adequately apply to implementations licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). In response to these requests for clarification, we publicly conclude that the OSP provides no assurance to GPL developers and that it is unsafe to rely upon the OSP for any free software implementation, whether under the GPL or another free software license.
Read the full paper here.
Red Hat News | Strike One Against Microsoft
by Michael Cunningham, Executive Vice President & General Counsel
Strike One!
In our last blog posted on February 21, I proposed three test pitches for Microsoft to help judge the meaningfulness of its latest efforts to turn over a new leaf on interoperability. The first of these was to embrace the extant, multi-vendor ISO standard, ODF (Open Document Format) in lieu of its single vendor dominated efforts to create a new standard, OOXML (Office Open XML).
The first pitch was thrown in Geneva last week at the ISO ballot resolution meetings on OOXML. And we can safely say: strike one! There was no renouncement of the OOXML standard by Microsoft. Instead, every indication was business as usual.
By the way, you have to seriously wonder about those Geneva meetings. According to reports I’ve received about the meetings (which were closed but reportedly audio recorded), only a disturbing 25 or so of the approximately 1,000 substantive comments that were scheduled to be acted upon were actually discussed. As for the remainder of the comments, it appears that, in order to complete the agenda, a decision was made to vote on all of the remaining, undiscussed comments in a single vote.
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Internet Archive defeats ‘National Security Letter,’ Makes it public
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Patent law: It’s not rocket science.
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