Comments on: OOXML Corruption

By: manchicken

manchicken — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 14:00:30 +0000

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.

By: John Malkovish

John Malkovish — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 22:59:41 +0000

@ 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.

By: guignome

guignome — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 18:57:35 +0000

I think William Jeffery isn’t director of NIST anymore.

By: manchicken

manchicken — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 18:26:25 +0000

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.

By: Jason

Jason — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 16:33:15 +0000

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.