Miscellanea for October’s end

Lots of interesting things happened these last days, and I was slow to catch up with them. A few of my highlights below:
Rob Weir from IBM talks about the upcoming OpenDocument Format 1.2 and that’s what will shut the mouth of lots of OOXML minions. I’ve had enough of them bragging about the ability to create custom XML schemas, as it goes against the very notion of interoperability.

Matt Asay, former Novellian, now at Alfresco delivers a very comprehensive presentation on the evolution of FOSS. By the way, did you hear about the surge of Windows in the server market? Since everybody’s coming up with its own opinion, here’s mine: that trend is 1) not fundamentally new 2)due largely to the network and lock-in effect caused by SharePoint (that ties both MS Office and the whole Windows server stack) 3) not a signal sent to the “Open Source World to listen to its customers”. See why here. Okay, maybe the way Red Hat or Ubuntu bundle their apps has something to do with that, especially since Microsoft emphasizes the usability and the programmability of its products. But when you come to think of it, it’s more like an addiction. You buy it because you like it, and you like it because your IT department cannot afford those better trained, and highly qualified engineers so you want to have an instant-deployment of a solution that will be coded in C# , JavaScript or through scripts macros heavily relying on MS Visual Studios (note: no Linux is needed here). That’s how Microsoft is becoming the Mc Donalds of computing.

Talking about Microsoft… no, wait, are you sure they stand behind this? I’m saying there’s no evidence. What? Two former Microsoft executives joined IP Innovation and… getting their patent troll to sue Red Hat and Novell (who, by the way, turns out to be one of their own customers)? No way, no connection between the patent troll and Redmond, Sir, Ain’t seen anything.

Last but not least…. Facebook. Just like millions of others out there, I’m on Facebook and I am not pleased by Microsoft’s investing money in that company, because even it’s that’s just called an equity investment the language of the announcement opens the door to much more than that. I’m going to be wary of Facebook now, and make sure to go away from it at the first notice of a deeper involvement by Redmond. Please, don’t turn Facebook into a MSN Messenger machine…