Latest INCITS Voting Results on OOXML; JTC1 Vote Begins to be Stacked
,----[ Quote ]
| The government decided to vote together, and to follow NIST (Homeland
| Security had voted in favor of approval in the previous ballot), so DoD fell
| in line as well. NIST, you may recall, is an agency of the Department of
| Commerce (as I reported Steve Ballmer personally called the Secretary of the
| DOC to urge this result). GS1is a technical association.
`----
http://www.consortiuminfo.org/standardsblog/article.php?story=2007082413463944
Does anybody still doubt the fact that Microsoft is *ABOVE* the law (even
overseas)?
Days ago:
Microsoft Looks for the Big Guns in OOXML In-Fighting
,----[ Quote ]
| Bill Gates has reportedly been making phone calls to the Secretary of Defense
| and the Secretary of Commerce to push the American National Standards
| Institute to ignore the votes of its advisory committees and vote "yes" on
| ISO standardizing Microsoft's Open Office XML (OOXML) format, the one in
| competition with the OpenDocument Format (ODF) pushed by IBM and Sun.
|
| Gates reportedly picked up the phone when the last INCITS ballot failed by
| one vote to support Microsoft.
`----
http://xml.sys-con.com/read/419573_p.htm
,----[ Quote ]
| Everyone is in the same boat with this: KOffice, Corel, Google, IBM, anyone
| who has applications that work with Microsoft documents. We’re all faced with
| the prospect of significant expenses to rewrite our file format support with
| no net benefit to our customers. This is the toll we all must pay to
| Microsoft just for the ability to fight for the scraps their monopoly may
| leave behind. If Microsoft jerks their format around, we all must run and
| chase after it, reallocating resources away from feature work, becoming in
| the process less competitive in the marketplace, while Microsoft forges ahead
| with new features. They can easily repeat this game every few years, just to
| keep competitors busy. This is what a death spiral looks like.
|
| Giving absolute control of a standard document format to a monopolist that is
| notorious for abusing their control of file formats in the past is insanity.
| It doesn’t take a Sherlock Holmes to figure that out.
`----
http://www.robweir.com/blog/2007/08/dog-that-didnt-bark.html
Related:
Fighting Megatron: five steps to freedom
,----[ Quote ]
| The free software world is being attacked by a large, wealthy, brutal
| monopolist, who I’ll call “Megatron” for today. As I wrote last month,
| Megatron is driving its OOXML tank through the village church of open
| standards, doing unspeakable things to the ISO process, with the intention of
| locking in a generation of computer users to its stack of patented,
| restricted, and undocumented formats. It’s about freedom, some of us want it,
| others want to take it away from us.
`----
http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/blogs/fighting_megatron_five_steps_to_freedom
Packing The Court At The ISO?
,----[ Quote ]
| ...P member countries ('participating member' countries) sending
| representatives, and I am interested to note the majority of
| their representatives are, as individuals, also Microsoft employees.
|
| [...]
|
| How can they not see that OOXML (ECMA 376) is unwanted by anyone outside of
| Microsoft? How about it Brian Jones? Are you really so desperate that you
| have to resort to that?
`----
http://lnxwalt.wordpress.com/2007/03/23/packing-the-court-at-the-iso/
,----[ Quote ]
| "Sadly, many of these brilliant people have been blinded by the stock
| price and unable to see that Microsoft is also the key architect of
| the greatest financial pyramid scheme this century.
|
| It is not uncommon for participants in pyramid schemes to lose their
| emotional bearings. My close friends who work at Microsoft are
| particularly upset over my work and it is possible that even Bill
| Gates and Steve Ballmer do not realize the implications of their
| financial practices."
`----
http://www.billparish.com/msftfraudfacts.html
,----[ Quote ]
| "As with all pyramid schemes, it is important to get as close to tier
| 1 as possible. From a practical standpoint, usually only tiers 1 and 2
| will derive significant long-term economic rewards from such schemes."
|
| "Microsoft has clearly entered a phase of self destructive behavior
| that began with the "tissue paper campaign" in 1995. This report will
| document this campaign for the first time."
`----
http://reactor-core.org/microsoft-pyramid.html
|
|
