The changes come into force in Outlook 2007. This means a fairly big setback for those who depend on HTML newsletters and also those who depend on Outlook - which is a huge block of the corporate market. A blog at the online media company SitePoint puts it this way: "With this release, Outlook drops from being one of the best clients for HTML email support to the level of Lotus Notes and Eudora..."

David Greiner at Campaign Monitor, an application "built exclusively for web designers to send permission based emails for themselves and their clients" had this to say: "This certainly doesn't spell the end for HTML email, it just takes us back 5 years where tables and nasty inline CSS was the norm."

There's much more in these blog entries but that isn't the point of bringing up this issue.: I reckon there's a lesson in this somewhere for Miguel de Icaza, the top open source man at Novell Inc, and the one who started Mono, an open source implementation of Microsoft's .Net development framework.

Some history for the uninitiated: De Icaza is the co-founder of the GNOME project, a desktop and development environment that begain life in 1997. The apparent reason behind the emergence of GNOME, when there was already one thriving desktop environment, KDE, was because KDE used QT, a toolkit from Trolltech which was not under a free software or open source software licence. KDE got underway in 1996 and by the time GNOME came along was already quite a good desktop for GNU/Linux and UNIX. (QT has now been released under the GPL as well).

Along with Nat Friedman, De Icaza started a company in 1999; called International Gnome Support in the planning stages, it is better known as Helix Code and later as Ximian. The aim of the company was to market the GNOME desktop commercially. It was bought by Novell in August 2003.

De Icaza and Friedman were acquainted before they met - at Microsoft in 1997 where Friedman was an intern on the IIS team. De Icaza interviewed for a job at Redmond, to join the team that was porting the company's Java VM to the Sparc, but was unsuccessful.