On Nov 5, 4:27 pm, 7 <web_has_em...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Roy Schestowitz wrote:
> > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> > Hash: SHA1
> > Microsoft offers South Korea $60 million 'encouragement' to use its
> > software
> > ,----[ Quote ]
> > | IN WHAT APPEARS to be a rather desperate move by Microsoft, the firm is
> > | actually paying South Korea $60 million just to use its software.
Microsoft understands that if the Government switches to ODF software,
such as Open Office or Symphony, that all of the businesses that do
business with the government will also switch to ODF. Microsoft's
support for ODF is marginal at best, which means that Office would
have been something that Korean Corporations would simply abandon,
refusing to renew service contracts, refusing upgrades, and
essentially refusing to pay another dime for Microsoft Office - after
paying through the nose for almost 20 years.
Microsoft is desparately trying to get businesses and governments to
upgrade to Office 2007 - because, by default, it saves all documents
in OOXML. The goal is to save all the documents in a format that
cannot easily be converted to ODF without losing critical elements of
data.
Unfortunately, the OOXML documents tend to break virus checkers, and
the result is that viral documents sent by unwitting users are
spreading new viruses faster than ever. The viruses spread themselves
by putting invisible OLE objects into the templates, which means every
document created gets the viral agent, and the viral agent gets
executed when the OOXML document is opened.
The new version of Office is also suffering due to the rejection of
Vista.
It's quite likely that the Obama administration will endorse ODF, with
the support of IBM and Sun as well as the OpenOffice improvements,
there is a pretty good chance that ODF will become the de-facto
standard for future government and business documents.
> >http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2008/11/04
> microsoft-pays-south-korea
> Interesting - the Korean government only paid token $8m into the scheme.
> They have no faith in micoshaft.
> Governments usually go in 50:50.
Many of Microsoft's deals have been focused on preventing the
elimination of Microsoft Office formats, even policies that forbid the
generation of new documents in Microsoft Office document formats newer
than Office 2000 (which can be read by most ODF applications and
converted to ODF).
Many countries were considering mandatory switches to Linux and OO,
and Microsoft's deal was to allow staff to continue to use Windows and
MS-Office and use Open Office as an additional application. This
weakens the push to switch to Open Document format.
> May be Korean government now knows free software like Linux
> is better than micoshaft's money sucking projects - so they acted
> to eliminate micoshaft from achieving dominance over other Korean companies
> by not chipping in.
Very likely true. After almost 20 years of fraud, extortion,
sabotage, and obstruction of justice, Microsoft has overplayed it's
hand with Vista, and Linux and Unix have been "calling the bet". More
and more companies are looking seriously at Apple's OS/X and OEMs are
looking much more seriously at Linux as a way to compete.
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