KDE takes stand on OOXML; GNOME dithers
By Sam Varghese
Monday, 10 December 2007 17:27
Page 2 of 2
The GNOME Foundation did not stop trying to spin the issue. On Waugh's suggestion, an online radio conference was hosted by Rod Amis on his Lightning Strikes show at BlogTalkRadio. The American technology news site Linux.com provided the moderator in Robin Miller, one of its writers.
This was supposed to be a discussion between Waugh and Roy Schestowitz, co-founder of the BoycottNovell.com site, which, as the name implies, was set up after Novell and Microsoft in November last year signed a patent deal which enabled Microsoft to spread plenty of FUD about alleged patent violations in Linux.
The discussion was supposed to be about OOXML and both Waugh and Schestowitz were cast as two sides of a debate as they had both been mentioned prominently in a report run by Linux.com.
Sadly, Schestowitz hardly got a word in edgeways. He found himself up against Waugh, Miller and Bruce Byfield (also from Linux.com - both Byfield and Miller were quite obviously biased towards Waugh's point of view), and also Miguel de Icaza, the co-founder of the GNOME project, who phoned in and was allowed to stay on and speak whenever he felt so inclined. About a third of the audio conference was plagued by technical problems and Miller added to the problem of lack of time by repeatedly raising silly questions from those who had joined in on an allied instant relay chat channel.
(De Icaza, it must be added, had just finished speaking at a Microsoft-sponsored conference titled XML2007 in Boston, Massachusetts.)
There was one sensible question during the entire hour (MP3 available here) - Miller asked Waugh why GNOME and all the other major FOSS projects had not joined together and taken a stand that they would not support OOXML. Waugh talked around it - and the absence of any genuine journalist in that discussion was made plain as nobody tried to pin Waugh down and get him to answer the question. He was allowed to spin and did so. No genuine journalist would have allowed that.
A day later, Byfield wrote a piece which made the insane claim that, judging by this discussion, there did not appear to be much difference between the positions taken by Schestowitz and Waugh!
Given the manner in which projects like GNOME have indicated their eagerness to prostrate themselves before Microsoft, the Redmond-based company has already started going back on public promises regarding control of the OOXML standard.
Microsoft had initially said that ISO would have control; now it has changed its tune and says control would remain with ECMA, which is nothing more than an industry association dedicated to the standardisation of information and communication technology and consumer electronics.
Expectedly, the GNOME Foundation has not had a word to say about this development.
I'm pretty sure, though, that Waugh will leave a comment below, questioning why he wasn't asked for input about this article - before he lets off steam against me (and not the points made in this piece) on a members-only mailing list. Last time it was the Open Source Industry Association mailing list.
GNOME has a great many strengths - but one of its major weaknesses is having a media spokesman who does not know the difference between news and comment. He makes the Foundation look very amateurish.
