Help Stop Broken Standards!

Posted by ottodv on Sat, 11/10/2007 - 23:48Personal

One of the great things that Mozilla has achieved with Firefox is that  open non-proprietary standards are now much more widely used on the Internet.

I don't think I need to explain here what the benefits of open non-proprietary standards are for the development of the Internet and software industry by removing artificial barriers to competition.

Microsoft seems to have learned something from this. They are now trying to elevate some of their proprietary standards to internationally recognized standards. However these "standards" are not truly open as Microsoft seems to holds patents on ways to implement parts of these standards. In effect this amounts to a standard which only they can legally implement. This is only one of the issues with Microsoft's proposed OOXML "Standard".

At the same time they (meaning Microsoft) have been accused of "bribing" delegations from several nations to vote in favor of OOXML at ISO.

The risk that this bad standard may get adopted next February is real. You can help prevent this by telling your country's delegation to vote NO! and signing the petition:

http://www.noooxml.org/
http://www.noooxml.org/petition

 

Otto

 


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Re: Help Stop Broken Standards!
Submitted by JustZisGuy on Mon, 11/12/2007 - 02:07.

Where I work they recently plopped down Office 2007 on all of the PCs. Over night everyone started using and e-mailing document files in Microsoft's new proprietary .docx format.

Our Solaris terminals running Firefox and OpenOffice (used for people travelling from different offices to check their e-mail) instantly could no longer open their attached documents. And no converter is available for that platform. Other various non-Microsoft apps also "broke" as they can not read the new format.

This has repeatedly happened before, and this will happen again, and again, as long as MS has control of such formats.

 

Also look at most corporate networks and you will see that many of them use Microsoft web proxies using their proprietary NTLM authentication. All it would take is a slight change and POOF no more Firefox for you!  I was around back when these started going up - instantly rendering Netscape Communicator or any other browser besides IE inoperable. It took forever for Mozilla to get an NTLM implementation!

Anyway, we can't let this kind of thing happen again. Vote to keep standards away from Microsoft.... better yet, vote to destroy Microsoft!!!

 

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It goes further than just OOXML
Submitted by jrb on Sun, 11/11/2007 - 13:55.

They've also implemented "open" standards in their products, but have customised them somewhat to break interoperability with other systems where it hurts them, but are happy to interoperate where it benefits them (examples: TCP/IP for network connectivity - but adding WINS and NetBIOS has effectively customised it; http and https for web server/browsers).

There are two key points resulting from this:

1. People currently using MS products but looking to move away, especially the non techie/programmer types, will be under the mistaken impression that their existing software will work flawlessly against the replacement product, just taking one out and dropping in the new one. It doesn't work like that.
(thus increasing product lockin and making it more difficult to move away).

Yet they still use the original protocol name to make it look like their existing or forthcoming software will support them, perhaps for box ticking exercises in procurement. The MCSE books specifically say they have a customised implementation of Kerberos in Active Directory.
This again is misrepresentation.

However, here I have to say that MS aren't the only company guilty of implementing a "standard" with custom tweaks (virtually every database server vendor has done this, claiming ANSI SQL compatability at various levels).

2. In the UK, where I am, software patents are illegal. Therefore, companies trying to claim compensation from others for use of software patents in the UK are out of luck, as well as filing them. It may be different in other countries.
(for proof, see the first paragraphs of http://osdir.com/ml/law.eucd.ukcdr/2004-05/msg00020.html, http://news.zdnet.co.uk/itmanagement/0,1000000308,39270929,00.htm and http://www.aleph1.co.uk/updated-software-patents-talk)

and a recent challenge to the law: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/05/29/legal_patent_challenge/

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