Free Software Linux

I'm not a Kindle user. In part, because it's not available in the UK, but also because it seems too closed in terms of its overall architecture. But it's clearly winning fans - and I think that's going to be a problem. Why that might be is revealed by this interesting posting: Reading .DOC and (some) .PDF files. This part of the Kindle's function turns out to be much more important than I anticipated. Mine can't be the only line of work that involves an endless stream of material to read, often arriving as Word .DOC or Adobe .PDF files. I resist printing them out, and I resent the additional hours of sitting in front a computer screen to read them.

The Microsoft-faithful go out of their way to say that OOXML has lost to ODF?

The Agency for the Development of Government Electronic Management and Information and Knowledge Society of Uruguay have now published their recommendation that public documents use either ODF or PDF. The former should be used for documents in the process of being edited and the latter for documents in final form. (To see a discussion of these document uses, see my May, 2006, blog entry.)

More wins and progress for ODF, at the expense of Microsoft lock-in.

a case study done by Prof. Rajanish Dass of IIM A on the Espousal of ODF by the Dept. of IT, Delhi. It talks about the decision of DoIT to move to OpenOffice from a popular proprietory software and its implications.

Yesterday we wrote about Microsoft’s attempt to ‘consume’ ODF. Joining the skepticism now is the man behind the open source definition and a vocal critic of Novell’s deal with Microsoft. Bruce Perens does not trust Microsoft, either. He explains why.

The fight against the adoption of OOXML as an ISO standard is continuing in many countries. In the UK the UK Unix & Open Systems User Group (UKUUG) unsuccessfully, sought a judicial review of the British Standards Institute’s decision to vote yes. UKUUG are now seeking to appeal against that rejection of a review and you can help them.

Microsoft's national technology officer had an interesting comment during the Red Hat Summit in Boston about who "won" the ODF and OOXML battle. And the reason why is equally interesting.

The following has been discussed in the IRC channel for a couple of hours, but it’s still inconclusive. We share with you information that an anonymous reader claims to have found. We can’t confirm any of this to be verifiable, but this need to be considered in light of the fact that the defunct OpenDocument Foundation (not alliance) seemed close to Microsoft. It was odd at the time.

Microsoft Office possibly scares users who try to open ODF in Microsoft Office.

Microsoft returns intimidating error messages to those intending to open ODF; Notepad works where OpenOffice.org fails in Vista

As the ISO announced, the planned ISO/IEC DIS 29500 cannot be published until these complaints have been heard. Procedure requires that they be dealt with by the end of June, when the ISO and IEC have to hand over their comments on the complaints to two management committees for a final decision.

It has just been made easier to keep an eye on whether ODF gets subverted or not

There is an announcement just posted about OASIS opening a new discussion list for members and nonmembers to discuss a proposal to form a new technical committee to help out with "ODF Implementation, Interoperability and Conformance". Yes, interoperability is the key.

The post highlights some of the latest disinformation you ought to watch out for