Has many interesting and thoughtful things to say. For example, his replies to comments on his recent Slashdotters: all together now … ‘Doh!’ are well worth reading (although on careful examination the material in the post - quotes from Slashdot - are not as uncomplimentary to Slashdotters as Rick apparently thought). He makes several careful distinctions that others often miss.
On the other hand, he is capable of missing the point and precisely because he is smart and thoughtful I find it hard to believe that he does not know it. Replying to comments in New Adventures in Spin: “No one needs to use any voluntary ISO standard. You choose the best one for the job. This may be ODF in many cases. It may be that Open XML is never suitable for you and that you should never use it. So please allow the rest of us who would be served by it becoming an ISO standard. If it is no use to you, and since it doesn’t affect ODF adoption, why should you care?”
Well, clearly it does affect ODF adoption, because ODF can only be adopted by a significant share of the market if people switch and they are less likely to switch if OpenXML is an ISO/IEC standard. But quite apart from that, OpenXML is already a standard (an Ecma standard), so the question is why it should be adopted as an ISO/IEC standard, when there is already an existing standard.
Now it is a perfectly respectable argument, although I have not seen anyone in the current debate make it, that ISO/IEC should not have adopted ODF as an ISO/IEC standard. After all, what possible sense is there in adopting X as an international standard when over 95% of the market uses a different standard Y?
Countering that is not particularly easy. I think one would have to make some kind of “pour encourager les autres” argument: MS had every opportunity to participate in the OASIS process and declined to do so, so it is MS’s fault if ODF does not meet its requirements. ODF should be adopted and governments should mandate it, thus forcing MS to incur the expense of switching to a standard which may be a far from ideal fit to its needs. If one did not take that line, then others would be encouraged to boycott standards discussions in the expectation that ISO/IEC would veto the standard because of their non-participation.
Of course, one does not need to counter it. Maybe it is true that ODF should not have been adopted by ISO/IEC, but we are where we are. Now that it has been adopted, it is wrong to adopt a competing standard.
There is also the more simple-minded approach that MS has consistently abused file formats to maintain and extend its monopoly position. Governments should be seeking to overturn that monopoly, not helping to buttress it.
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