Groklaw heeft een uiterst betrokken artikel geplaatst over het wel en vooral het wee rond Microsoft's beoogde documentstandaard OOXML. Enkele citaten:
Microsoft's problem isn't technical or financial or a matter of skill. It's attitudinal. Microsoft, from what I see, doesn't want to be interoperable with the GPL, their principal competition, or with ODF unless someone forces them. And that's not a problem we can fix for them. If they desired true interoperability, not customer lock in, they'd embrace ODF and work out one standard we could all use, no matter what operating system we use. Think about the obvious goal of Microsoft's current patent strategy. It's the same song, to me. The GPL is being squeezed out, if Microsoft gets its way, and we all get squeezed for money whether we use Microsoft software or not.
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The world cares about ODF. And no one pays us to care or offers us perks if we will show up and join organizations or vote a certain way. Do you really think the City of Largo cares about market share? The Jaspal Kaur Public School in India? OLPC Nepal? They are ODF Alliance members. Why? Certainly not because of market share. That is, I think, the principal difference between OOXML and ODF. There are important reasons to want ODF, to comprehend the value of a single standard, that have nothing at all to do with money, for those whose minds have more than one track.
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You know why I care? I want to be able to share documents with my mom, and I know my mom can't figure out any of the translators, so it's hopeless unless people take into consideration us little people and not just the wishes of a certain large US vendor in the Northwest. Someone left a comment on Groklaw once about a family that experienced a death in the family, and they tried to quickly work up a document to notify everyone and to plan the funeral. One family member wrote up a draft, and then sent it to everyone for input. They couldn't get their software to interoperate, and everything ended up messed up, and it was simply impossible to get the job done quickly enough. That shouldn't happen. It doesn't need to happen.
Het volledige artikel staat
hier.