Novell used to protest against lock-in; Malaysian state moves to OpenOffice.org; Sutor says OOXML going nowhere

In the recent accusations that the GNOME Foundation has been supporting Microsoft's OOXML format at the expense of ODF, KDE has been presented as a counter-example. Based on a KDE News article, Richard Stallman suggested that "major KDE developers" had announced "their rejection of OOXML" and urged GNOME to do the same.

After Microsoft "bought" OOXML support from Novell, the company's PR reps suggest that it is bad practice

Last week, following a radio discussion, linux.com writer Bruce Byfield characterised two opposing FOSS camps in the OOXML debate who participated in that discussion as being "closer than they have appeared in the past."

"...I am aware that I’m making a very long story short here. But I’m doing this on purpose: the conspiracy that Bruce refers could be summarized as Novell engineers hijacking Gnome to serve their own corporate needs, and the problem is, these needs are aligned with the ones of Microsoft. [...] The most important lesson of this is that what matters is the format, not the application. The format creates the network effect and captures users, unless it is open and standard. [...] Apparently some would still like us to believe OOXML is an open standard. Make no mistake, OOXML is not an open standard, just like Christmas is not Easter."

Back in August we warned that Microsoft had just made a very suspicious donation at a very strategic time. It only days before the September vote on OOXML. The article which was cited at the time has vanished, but you can find a copy here...

The OOXML specification has been both criticized and defended by a number of people, leading many to wonder what the big deal is. This article illustrates the basis of technical, rather than political, objections to treating OOXML as a standard.

Not just Mono but OOXML too is being used by Novell to promote and to spread Microsoft formats with software patents

Or both? ALEX Brown is pretending that all is fine and dandy with OOXML (he even shows a picture of a smiling face), despite all the OOXML corruption which had people protest out in the streets.