On Saturday 31 Mar 2012 12:31:12 Terry Coles wrote: > On Tuesday 27 Mar 2012 11:10:27 [email protected] wrote: > > This 'Consultation' will support the lobbing giants as I am sure it is > > designed to do. I am keeping my eyes, and hopes, on developing Open > > Source offerings. > > You could be right.... > > http://www.computerweekly.com/blogs/public-sector/2012/03/microsoft-redeploy > s- ooxml-in-o.html
Well you were right: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/apr/27/microsoft-government- consultation. Basically, it turns out that one of the public consultation meetings was facilitated by a consultant who was also being paid by Microsoft to 'advise on issues arising'. He never divulged the relationship and the results of his meeting has now had to be dropped. To give you a flavour of his results (in case you thought this might be co-incidence): 'he wrote that the "gut feel" among the majority of the 16 attendees was that open standards would be "detrimental" to innovation and competition.' If you visit the consultation website and follow the links to the questions, you will see that most of the respondents to the web consultation were very pro Open and in some cases openly anti Microsoft, so his findings are completely at odds with the real world. Elsewhere in the article, it is suggested that Microsoft are paying lawyers to stack the meetings. This is straight out of Microsoft's play book and exactly how they got OOXML through ISO. The story about Microsoft's dirty tricks was started by Glyn Moody. His blog is at: http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open-enterprise/2012/04/how-microsoft- lobbied-against-true-open-standards-i/index.htm and here is the Government announcement: http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/2012/04/26/open-standards-consultation- important-update/ -- Terry Coles 64 bit computing with Kubuntu Linux -- Next meeting: Bournemouth, Tuesday 2012-05-01 20:00 Meets, Mailing list, IRC, LinkedIn, ... http://dorset.lug.org.uk/ New thread on mailing list: mailto:[email protected] How to Report Bugs Effectively: http://goo.gl/4Xue
