Miguel's delusions of grandeur

Sam Varghese
Monday, 29 October 2007 22:13

Opinion and Analysis

What is Miguel de Icaza's latest game? His obsession with tailgating everything that Microsoft develops - and trying to impress the company by producing Linux equivalents - now seems to be spreading to others as well.


News has emerged that the GNOME foundation is participating in meetings to discuss adoption of Microsoft's Office Open XML formats.

There are a few people in the FOSS community who think that they can actually fight with an 800-pound gorilla and win. Some of these people are apparently part of the GNOME foundation.

Microsoft is trying its level best to get OOXML accepted as a standard format. And de Icaza and some other FOSS developers appear over-eager to help the company achieve its aim.

De Icaza is on record as saying that OOXML is a "superb standard" - though a great many other developers have found problems aplenty with the specifications.

For a long time de Icaza, who is now on the staff of Novell, appears to have been trying to please the people at Redmond. First it was with Mono, his implementation of Microsoft's .NET development environment.

Next, when Microsoft came up with something called Silverlight - which it hopes to push as a competitor to Adobe's Flash - de Icaza developed a clone called Moonlight and took it to one of the senior executives at Microsoft, Bob Muglia, for his approval.

Reading through mailing lists where de Icaza exchanges opinions with FOSS icons like Richard Stallman and Alan Cox, one can only marvel at his obstinacy.

He just refuses to believe that Microsoft has ulterior motives in anything it does in the field of interoperability - despite there being plenty of evidence to prove this.

Now the people at GNOME are starting to sound like toadies as well.

One of the foundation's board members, Jeff Waugh, had this to say on the American tech site Slashdot: "The background is really simple: While Jody Goldberg (Gnumeric maintainer extraordinaire) was at Novell, he had been doing rocking work on the ECMA committee to make sure OOXML didn't just slip through, under-specified and uninvestigated. Jody put them through the wringer!

"So, when Jody left Novell, the GNOME Foundation supported his participation on the ECMA working group, so he could continue to "keep the bastards honest". :-)

"The GNOME Foundation does not support ISO standardisation of OOXML. But whether or not that happens, we're still going to have to support Microsoft document formats, just like everyone else. Should we let Microsoft shove OOXML through ECMA without challenge? Hell no. That's why we have one of our best hackers in there, holding their feet to the fire."

If Waugh actually believes that a tiny organisation like GNOME can actually influence things at the world's biggest software company, a convicted monopolist and one which has shown a willingness to use tactics which can only be described as dubious any time it feele threatened, then I've got a bridge in Brooklyn which I'd like him to buy.