Why Microsoft Is Going Open Source (Linux Journal) [LWN.net]

Glyn Moody analyzes Microsoft's recent open source moves in a Linux Journal blog posting. "This, I think, goes to the heart of Microsoft's open source strategy. As well as adopting those aspects of an alternative development model that it finds useful, Microsoft is aiming to blunt the undeniable power of openness by hollowing it out. If OOXML is an open standard, and some of its own software licences become OSI-approved, Microsoft will be able to claim that it, too, is an open standard, open source company. For many busy managers, subject to all kinds of demands including increasing pressure to 'go open source' - the difference between Microsoft's open source and real open source won't matter, in the same way that the difference between Microsoft's open file formats and those of the OpenDocument Format won't really matter. In terms of keeping people happy, what matters for many is the label the appearance of going open and Microsoft's moves aim to provide just that."

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Why Microsoft Is Going Open Source (Linux Journal)

Posted Aug 6, 2007 17:19 UTC (Mon) by Brotherred (guest, #45141) [Link]

Those who do not know, pay for it. The ignorant will pay dearly.

Why Microsoft Is Going Open Source (Linux Journal)

Posted Aug 6, 2007 20:12 UTC (Mon) by allesfresser (subscriber, #216) [Link]

Unfortunately, the ignorant many times drag the rest of us down with them, thanks to things like judicial precedent.

Why Microsoft Is Going Open Source (Linux Journal)

Posted Aug 7, 2007 20:51 UTC (Tue) by doodaddy (guest, #10649) [Link]

Can someone explain to me what the big deal is? 99.9% of all text documents are essentially form letters that a typewriter could produce. This should be especially true for non-tech businesses. How would these people even know that OpenOffice can't convert *every* document that Word puts out? For all practical purposes it is a complete converter.

(The last .01% would be fine with a little tweaking.)

Why Microsoft Is Going Open Source (Linux Journal)

Posted Aug 8, 2007 7:56 UTC (Wed) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

Unfortunately this last 0.1% can be quite important. For example is you have table with check marks and these check marks do not fit in table... the whole document is useless!

If you go from plain old documents to templates and forms it becomes more complicated: if you can see the form but can not change the values in it - it's mostly useless. If it even looks more-or-less correct but text does not fit in places reserved for text - you need to do a lot of editing, etc.

And biggest problem is not even "little tweaking" - it's finding that document was not converted correctly in first place!

The folly of it all is that OOXML is useless as form of "full-fidelity conversion tool": MS Office for years had problems with backward compatibility (because the format was never documented and was not designed with backward compatibility in mind) so it takes more-or-less the same effort to go from .DOC to .DOCX or to go from .DOC to .ODT ...