| Office ODF Support: Bad for Business!? |
May 10, 2006
You've got to love Microsoft's sloppy way of opposing Linux and open-source some days.
In Microsoft's latest FUD move, as reported in Linux Pipeline, Melanie Wyne, executive director of the ISC (Initiative for Software Choice), has accused the Massachusetts Information and Technology Division of having "a biased, open source-only preference policy."
Their crime? Requesting a plug-in for Microsoft's Office Suite that can save and read to the ODF (OpenDocument Format). Horrors!
The ISC is part of the COMPTIA industry group. It claims to represent "growing global coalition of large and small companies committed to advancing the concept that multiple competing software markets should be allowed to develop and flourish unimpeded by government preference or mandate."
Actually, it's a front for Microsoft's anti-open-source efforts. Each and every one of its public utterances is about how no one should require or recommend the use of open-source or open standards in their IT purchases.
The ISC doesn't, however, do a very good job at its mission.
Take these current claims. Much as I like the ODF, it's not so much about open-source as it is about open-standards. After-all, you don't write ODF programs, you write ODF files.
As I reported last week, no sooner had Massachusetts asked for a way to enable the proprietary Microsoft Office to get along with ODF than the OpenDocument Foundation Inc.'s co-founder and president, Gary Edwards, announced that they an Office plug-in that would allow Office users to open, render, and save to ODF files, while also allowing translation of documents between Microsoft's binary (.doc, .xls, .ppt) or XML formats and ODF.
As Edwards himself said at the time, this won't help open-source office programs. "The open document vendors -- IBM, Sun, Novell, KOffice, OpenOffice.org -- sell alternatives to MS Office. They're selling a replacement. This will extend the useful life of MS Office," said Edwards.
So, what's not for Microsoft and its buddies to like?
The answer, of course, is that by freeing users to use a format that other programs can use, the plug-in allows users to use another office suite besides Microsoft Office.
Wyne whined that, supporting ODF has "little to do with access to documents, and everything to do with excluding proprietary software providers."
Oh please!
It would take Microsoft, what one, two days to add ODF support to Office? And, how does adding a 'free as in beer' plug-in to Office to give it that support hurt Microsoft?
Just giving customers the possibility, the mere possibility of choosing something other than Office, seems to have Microsoft and its cronies all in a twitter.
This has got to be one of the stupidest examples I've seen to date of a Microsoft buddy claiming that black is white. Amazing, simply amazing.
-- Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
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