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On the Art (?) of Disinformation: telling the Big Lie

Posted by Andy_Updegrove on · 1 comment
ConsortiumInfo.org; By Andy Updegrove
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This blog entry is a rarity for me: an exegesis on the deliberate disinformation of a single vendor. Of course, calling out falsehoods by some vendors is like shooting the same old fish in a barrel, but occasionally you have to haul out the firearm when they start landing in your soup.

What persuaded me to take up the cudgels in this case was a quote tI read earlier this week in eWeek, and then spotted again at   Bob Sutor's blog today:

"You can achieve interoperability in a number of ways," said [Microsoft's] Robertson. Among them: joint collaboration agreements, technology licensing and interoperability pacts.


The reason this statement caught my eye was that Scott Edwards (also of Microsoft) had used virtually the exact same words at a NIST workshop that I had spoken at a month or so ago, offering such methods as valid alternatives to "open standards." My reaction then, as now, was that such means can in no way represent equivalent alternatives to open standards, although they might offer an avenue to a single vendor, or to a cadre of vendors, to control a marketplace to their own advantage.

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Comments (1)

David Berlind's quote : "Of course, the more work technology buyers have to do to get to the truth (which Microsoft is indeed obfuscating), the less time supporters of ODF have to curry favor with them. That's because the same organization that just ratified ODF as an international standard (the ISO) is probably within a year of giving the same, very dubious honor, to Microsoft's Open XML. " http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/index.php?p=3003

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