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OOXML Corruption
Application Trends is reporting that the U.S. is voting 11-to-4 to approve OOXML as a standard. William Jeffery, the director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, is quoting as saying that the NIST favors competing standards. What a crock.
“Dr.” Jeffery is naive to believe that any standard that Microsoft will cram up the asses of consumers will ever be competitive. Microsoft itself is not competitive. They do what they can to remove any opposition in favor of market dominance. If approved as a standard, OOXML will be used as a platform for more market dictation, just as the exceedingly limited Internet Explorer has been for the web application market. Once again it looks like we’re going to be limited by Microsoft’s inferior technology and selfish ideas.
It is my opinion that the U.S. Government is siding with a vendor with which they have contracts and are being encouraged–financially of course–to do so.
The general public, it seems, doesn’t deserve a choice. They all just need to sit down, shut up, and use Geniune Microsoft Software.
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on Monday, March 24th, 2008 at 09:08 and is filed under Free Software.
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Stumble it!
The problem is that the average Joe does not know that there is an alternative to Microsoft. In fact, to most people Microsoft is synonymous with computers. There needs to be a campaign to let people know about free software like OpenOffice and Linux.
As far as this problem goes, it seems like Microsoft should be required to implement an office standard that alternatives have already adopted and are already well-supported.
That way people can still use Office programs and they’re not tied down when they do discover alternatives.
I think William Jeffery isn’t director of NIST anymore.
@ Jason
Yes, I think some more campaigns should be done sometimes in Open Source.
The money shouldn’t be a problem if every tenth user donates $5 or so.
We shouldn’t foreget what we can achieve through collective donations for such occasions.
I remember how Emule survived due to the donations when it was taken/brought to court/trial.
I am sure there are campaigns, but some money is needed to make that visible to the masses, like firefox did it with an ad in the new york times I think.
John, I couldn’t agree more! I encourage everybody to click my FSF member button, or the Eliminate DRM button to join the FSF and Defective By Design campaigns to help further Free Software. Even if you can’t afford USD $10/mo dues–there are discounted student dues–make whatever donation you can.