billy(c)rap

Crap and Rap about my life

Archive for August, 2007

India votes “no” for OOXML

Aug 24

Posted by Binoy in Technology | No Comments

The war of OpenDoc Format (ODF) vs. Office Open XML (OOXML) has reached the Indian shores. India on Thursday gave Microsoft a thumbs-down in the war of standards for office documents. In a tense meeting at Delhi’s Manak Bhawan, the 21-member technical committee decided that India will vote a ‘no’ against Microsoft’s Open Office Extensible Mark Up Language (OOXML) standard at the International Standards Organisation (ISO) in Geneva on September 2.

A global alliance of Sun-IBM, Oracle, Google, Red Hat have ganged up against Microsoft which is being supported by Apple, Quark, Accenture and Novell. On Indian soil, Infosys, HCL, Skelta, Sonata Software and Sify have come out in support of Microsoft.

September 2 is the last date for voting and the results are going to be close. About 123 counties are participating in the vote. Votes from most are still to come. Canada, Czech Republic, Iran, Japan, Libya, Cuba, New Zealand, UK are likely to back the IBM-Sun’s ODF Alliance. On the other hand, Belgium, Finland, Italy, Spain, Brazil, Singapore, Korea, France and Australia are likely to abstain from voting.

The Microsoft backed and created format i believed to be inferior and technically lacking as compared to the Open Source ODF format. OOXML is incomplete (does not provide mappings with legacy standards, since compatibility is OOXML goal), too long (6000+ pages), fully tied to a single product, uses deprecated substandards, promotes bad practices (embedded binary objects), has clear proprietary hooks (like “formatAsWord95? XML tags, no surprises here), reinvents the wheel all around (date and color formats etc), and most of all does not have a standards-grade look and feel required for a universal and (virtually) eternal document format (doesn’t have to be perfect, but can’t be that imperfect). Countries that will absent their vote probably had a tough time in the decision process with a lot of conflicts between political ramblings and technical facts. This was almost the case for India and our government, but we got the courage to do the right thing.

Microsoft legal advisor has said, India might change its decision if MS corrects its 600 technical problems with OOXML The technical problems are not really technical, they are management decisions to make sure MS monopoly stays.. After all Office is the 2nd largest cash bank for microsoft after windows. While Linux has been standing up against Windows, Open Office has been fighting against MS Office. I will recommend all readers to try out Open Office (windows version is available). I am really proud India took this decision. I hope India does not change its mind, due to a certain someone (cough..MS) sending in a few projects to India or some cash flows in.

ELER – Everybody loves Eric Raymond

Aug 13

Posted by Binoy in other | 1 Comment

I stumbled across this site . Its a comic strip about The 3 gurus of FOSS/FSF (Richard Stallman, Eric Raymond and Linus Torvalds ) living together in the same apartment. Pretty funny and geeky.

Oh for those scraching your heads after reading those names. Wikipedia comes to your rescue.

Richard Stallman (rms) – FSF founder, Modern Gandhi
Eric Raymond (esr) – The man who explained the economics behind FOSS.Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow!
Linus Torvalds – Maintaner of the linux kernel. Respect.

Update:

I thought the email where Microsoft tried to hire Eric Raymond might be a good addition to this post. Here u go.

 

From: “Mike Walters (Search Wizards)” <v-mikewa@microsoft.com>
To: <esr@thyrsus.com>Eric,I am a member of the Microsoft Central Sourcing Team. Microsoft is
seeking world class engineers to help create products that help people
and businesses throughout the world realize their full potential.Your name and contact info was brought to my attention as someone who
could potentially be a contributor at Microsoft. I would love an
opportunity to speak with you in detail about your interest in a career
at Microsoft, along with your experience, background and qualifications.
I would be happy to answer any questions that you may have and can
also provide you with any information I have available in regard to the
position s and work life at Microsoft.Please take a moment to visit My Calendar
<http://www.appointmentquest.com/provider/2010224927> online to
schedule a convenient time for me to contact you. You can learn more
about our vision for the New World of Work at
<http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/execmail>
http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/execmail.Additionally, if you are aware of any current or previous colleagues
who might also be interested in opportunities at Microsoft, I would be
happy to speak with them as well. Referrals are always welcome, and
are greatly appreciated.

Thank you in advance and I look forward to an opportunity to speak to
you in the near future

Best regards,

Mike

<http://members.microsoft.com/careers/default.mspx>

How far will you go?

Mike Walters
CST Senior Recruiter

Microsoft
One Microsoft Way
Redmond, WA 98052
<http://maps.yahoo.com/py/maps.py?Pyt=Tmap&addr=One+Microsoft+Way&csz=Re
dmond%2C+WA+98052&country=us>

I called Mike Walters, who told me my name had been passed to him by his research team. I indicated to him that I thought somebody was probably having a little joke at his expense, and promised him an email reply. Here is my reply in its entirety:

To: “Mike Walters (Search Wizards)” <v-mikewa@microsoft.com>
From: <esr@thyrsus.com>I’d thank you for your offer of employment at Microsoft, except
that it indicates that either you or your research team (or both)
couldn’t get a clue if it were pounded into you with baseball bats.
What were you going to do with the rest of your afternoon, offer jobs
to Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds? Or were you going to stick to
something easier, like talking Pope Benedict into presiding at a
Satanist orgy?If you had bothered to do five seconds of background checking, you
might have discovered that I am the guy who responded to Craig
Mundie’s “Who are you?” with “I’m your worst nightmare”, and that I’ve
in fact been something pretty close to your company’s worst nightmare
since about 1997. You’ve maybe heard about this “open source” thing?
You get one guess who wrote most of the theory and propaganda for it
and talked IBM and Wall Street and the Fortune 500 into buying in.
But don’t think I’m trying to destroy your company. Oh, no; I’d be
just as determined to do in any other proprietary-software monopoly,
and the community I helped found is well on its way to accomplishing
that goal.On the day *I* go to work for Microsoft, faint oinking sounds will be
heard from far overhead, the moon will not merely turn blue but
develop polkadots, and hell will freeze over so solid the brimstone
will go superconductive.But I must thank you for dropping a good joke on my afternoon. On
that hopefully not too far distant day that I piss on Microsoft’s
grave, I sincerely hope none of it will splash on you.Cordially yours,
Eric S. Raymond

(email copied from http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=208)