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[News] [Rival] Microsoft's OOXML Corruption Brings Patent Ambush

Buy, Cheat, Steal, and Lie: The OOXML Story

,----[ Quote ]
| A 2007 decision from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit may end 
| up coming back to haunt Microsoft in their ongoing U.S. antitrust battle. The  
| case revolved around claims by Broadcom that Qualcomm had deliberately 
| included its patents in the Universal Mobile Telecommunications System 
| standard in order to create a monopoly for its products. The appeals court 
| held that if a company acts deceptively to gain adoption of a standard that 
| then results in a monopoly to their advantage, they can be held to have 
| violated anti-trust laws, irrespective of their right to determine the use of 
| their patents. Interestingly enough, the Court of Appeals ruling relies on a 
| Federal Trade Commission ruling which in turn relied on — drumroll, please — 
| United States v. Microsoft, the very case that put MS under supervision in 
| the first place.          
| 
| All we can say is, we hope that with this many available avenues, something 
| is done to rectify the farce acted out over the last several months. 
`----

http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/buy-cheat-steal-and-lie-ooxml-story

Here's what Microsoft does to documents:

Death of Digital Media

,----[ Quote ]
| A storage device can become obsolete in less than two years, as this timeline 
| shows
|
| Death of Digital Media: Jaz! Clik! Sparq! In no time, some of these storage 
| devices leaped into oblivion. The media may survive, but will anyone be able 
| to read them?  
`----

http://spectrum.ieee.org/apr08/6107


Related:

EC probes OOXML standards-setting process

,----[ Quote ]
| A spokesman for the European Commissioner for Competition, Neelie Kroes, told 
| The Register that regulators were continuing to scrutinise interoperability 
| issues related to Microsoft’s products following complaints from the 
| Committee for Interoperable Systems (ECIS) group.   
| 
| As part of that process, the EC formally contacted a number of national 
| standards bodies, including the Norwegian Standards Institute (NSI), 
| requesting more details about possible irregularities in the OOXML 
| standardisation process.   
| 
| [...]
| 
| “It must be stressed that it is not the Commission's intention to influence 
| the outcome of this process, but the Commission considers it essential to 
| ensure that European competition law is not violated in the course of the 
| standard setting process,” he said in an email to El Reg.   
| 
| In January the EC began formal anti-trust probes against Microsoft in two 
| cases where it was alleged that the multinational firm had abused its strong 
| market position. As part of the investigation into the first case, the 
| Commission said that it would scrutinise OOXML on the grounds that the 
| specification doesn't work with those of competitors.    
`----

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/04/04/ooxml_ec_investigation_iso/


Could an Appeal Derail OOXML?

,----[ Quote ]
| Meanwhile, the normal ISO process means that OOXML will not become an 
| official standard until at least the two-month waiting period runs out. 
`----

http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3738336


Martin Bryan: we are getting “standardization by corporation”

,----[ Quote ]
| A November informative report of Martin Bryan, Convenor, ISO/IEC JTC1/SC34 
| WG1 highlights the fallout of the ECMA-376 fast-track process for ISO. He 
| says he is 'glad to be retiring before the situation becomes impossible'  
| 
| [...]
| 
| In what is an astonishingly outspoken report, Martin Bryan, Convenor, ISO/IEC 
| JTC1/SC34 WG1 has given us insight into the total mess that Microsoft/ECMA 
| have caused during their scandalous, underhand and unremitting attempts to 
| get - what is a very poorly written specification {i.e. DIS 29500 aka OOXML, 
| AR} - approved as an ISO standard. …    
`----

http://www.noooxml.org/forum/t-30107/martin-bryan:we-are-getting-standardization-by-corporation


Dysfunctional ISO - Courtesy of Microsoft

http://opendotdotdot.blogspot.com/2007/12/dysfunctional-iso-courtesy-of-microsoft.html


Microsoft accused of stacking ISO committee

,----[ Quote
| In a memo sent following his last meeting as head of the working group on 
| WG1, which is handling Microsoft’s application to make the Word format an ISO 
| standard as ECMA 376, outgoing Governor Martin Bryan (above), an expert on 
| SGML and XML, accused the company of stacking his group.   
`----

http://blogs.zdnet.com/open-source/?p=1777


EU Initiates Investigation Against Microsoft OOXML Push

,----[ Quote ]
| But with Steve Ballmer taking over as CEO, there was supposed to be a kinder, 
| gentler Microsoft - one that would play nicely with its competitors.  When 
| antitrust regulators in turn challenged this new Microsoft, it issued not 
| challenges to fight to the end to prove that it had done nothing illegal, but 
| statements promising to "cooperate fully."    
| 
| But at the same time, Microsoft is still a tough competitor.  As Microsoft's 
| Director of Corporate Standards Jason Matusow famously warned at his blog 
| last year:  
| 
|     Make no mistake; all parties are looking at the full picture to find 
|     strategies that will result in the outcome they desire. Provided - of 
|     course - that they do so within the context of the rules that apply to 
|     the process, this is exactly what one should expect to happen. It is 
|     going to be a very interesting next few months.    
| 
| Indeed, the months that followed proved to be interesting indeed.  Microsoft 
| said that some of its employees became over zealous, most flagrantly in 
| Sweden, where marketing assists were promised to several business partners as 
| incentives to join the national standards committee and vote for OOXM.   
`----

http://www.consortiuminfo.org/standardsblog/article.php?story=20080208082501776


EU Commission Investigating Microsoft's MSOOXML Push

,----[ Quote ]
| I hope they think to investigate the smear campaigns that seem to always 
| happen to anyone on the other side from Microsoft. What happened to Peter 
| Quinn was by no means unique.  
`----

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20080208151410252


Corrupt countries were more likely to support the OOXML document format

,----[ Quote ]
| Is this just a random coincidence? The median of the CPI index of the above 
| mentioned 70 countries is 3.95. Of the most corrupted half (CPI index less 
| than 3.95) 23 or 77% voted for approval (approval or approval with comments) 
| and 7 or 23% for disapproval; 5 abstained. Of the least corrupted half (CPI 
| index more than 3.95) 13 or 54% voted for approval and 11 or 46% voted for 
| disapproval; 11 abstained - see the table below.      
`----

http://www.effi.org/blog/kai-2007-09-05.en.html


Microsoft accused of more OOXML standards fiddling 

,----[ Quote ]
| However the 11 new countries are refusing to say how they will vote. These 
| include Cote d'Ivoire, Cyprus, Ecuador, Jamaica, Lebanon, Malta, Pakistan, 
| Trinidad and Tobago, Turkey, Uruguay and Venezuela. Most people seem to think 
| that these have been put there by Vole to make sure the standard gets pushed 
| through.    
`----

http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=42106

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