[clug] Internode dumps FOSS for MS Exchange

[Hal Ashburner]

On 18/02/2010 7:31 PM, Mike Carden wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 18, 2010 at 6:41 PM, Karun Dambiec<karun at linux.com>  wrote:
>
>    
>> I do not see anything wrong with Microsoft and vendors competing in the
>> market fairly using the same open format, rather than vendor lockin.
>>      
> Which was precisely my argument during the OOXML standardisation
> debate. If a vendor truly believes that their product is the best tool
> for the job, let them promote and demonstrate it as such rather than
> try to create their own version of a format standard. To be a little
> less abstract, I mean that Microsoft could have adopted the ODF format
> and declared that they would implement it better than anyone else and
> set about selling that user experience based on their belief in the
> excellence of their software. That they fought tooth and nail to not
> do so tells me that they lack confidence in the quality of their
> software.
>    

I didn't understand the issues with that but I'm sure it wasn't as clear 
cut as this, unfortunately.
This post and subsequent comments contain intelligent criticism of the 
various issues from people who've devoted many years of extremely hard 
work to open formats and implementing competition using closed formats. 
The idea that Jody Goldberg is a microsoft shill is just ridiculous. The 
fact that people accused him of such shows there are many who understand 
the technical issues as little as I do but are willing to be extremely 
emotional and aggressively rude about their ignorance. I don't 
understand it, but whatever we do or don't understand the abuse is not 
required.

http://blogs.gnome.org/jody/2007/09/10/odf-vs-oox-asking-the-wrong-questions/

Making a spec of an open document format actually useful is hard.