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[News] UK National Archives Occupied by Microsoft Shills; European Countries Say Yes to ODF

  • Subject: [News] UK National Archives Occupied by Microsoft Shills; European Countries Say Yes to ODF
  • From: Roy Schestowitz <newsgroups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Thu, 20 Dec 2007 18:49:16 +0000
  • Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.advocacy
  • Organization: Netscape / schestowitz.com
  • User-agent: KNode/0.10.4
Norway says yes to Open Standards in IT

,----[ Quote ]
| So, now two European (I know Norway is not truly part of the EEC but, like 
| Switzerland, it is in Europe) countries have mandated Open standards for 
| electronic documentation. I wonder how stupid the UK’s National Archive feel 
| now? Or perhaps, because their management are Microsoft puppets, they didn’t  
| really have a say in the first place…   
`----

http://www.theopensourcerer.com/2007/12/20/norway-says-yes-to-open-standards-in-it/

We talked about this in COLA before. The man who run UK National Archives is
also a Microsoft employee. This can be seen as a form of corruption given the
poor selection of proprietary formats for archiving.


Related:

British Library calls for digital copyright action

,----[ Quote ]
| In a manifesto released on Monday at the Labor Party Conference
| in Manchester, the United Kingdom's national library warned that the
| country's traditional copyright law needs to be extended to fully
| recognize digital content.
| 
| "Unless there is a serious updating of copyright law to recognize
| the changing technological environment, the law becomes an ass,"
| Lynne Brindley, chief executive of the British Library, told ZDNet
| UK. 
`----

http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9588_22-6119043.html


Vista and British Library put da Vinci online

,----[ Quote ]
| Microsoft and the British Library have digitised two of Leonardo da
| Vincis' notebooks.
| 
| [...]
| 
| The British Library has created an updated version of its application
| called "Turning the Pages" which allows people to browse parts of
| its 150 million piece collection via a web browser. We heard how
| this works better using Vista.
`----

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/01/30/vinci_notebooks_vista/


Publish And Perish

,----[ Quote ]
| Alexander Rose, the executive director of the futurist Long Now
| Foundation, worries about the impermanence of digital information.
| "If you save that computer for 100 years, will the electrical plugs
| look the same?" he asks. "The Mac or the PC--will they be around?
| If they are, what about the software? " So far there's no business
| case for digital preservation--in fact, for software makers like
| Microsoft, planned obsolescence is the plan.
| 
| "The reality is that it's in companies' interest that software should
| become obsolete and that you should have to buy every upgrade,"
| Rose says. We could be on the cusp of a turning point, though, in the
| way businesses and their customers think about digital preservation.
| "Things will start to change when people start losing all of their personal 
| photos," Rose said.
`----

http://www.forbes.com/2006/11/30/books-information-preservation-tech-media_cx_ee_books06_1201acid.html?partner=yahootix
http://tinyurl.com/yyjqoh


http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6265976.stm


http://www.number-10.gov.uk/output/Page11881.asp

    The UK Government champions open standards and interoperability through its
e Government Interoperability Framework (eGIF). Where possible the Government
only uses products for interoperability that support open standards and
specifications in all future IT developments.

    Interoperability and open standards also support the sustainability of
digital information beyond any single generation of technology. New techniques
for digital preservation being developed by The National Archives require the
periodic transformation of digital information to new formats as technology
changes. Such transformations will be simplified by the adoption of open
standards.

    No single format provides a universal solution for all types of digital
information, and The National Archives therefore actively monitors and
evaluates a wide range of existing and emerging formats (including
OpenDocument Format). A policy on digital preservation, which includes
guidance on the selection of sustainable data formats based on open standards,
is being formulated by The National Archives, and will help define the
standards for desktop systems. The National Archives technical
registry ‘PRONOM’ (new window) supports this through the provision of key
information about the most widely-used formats. 


Microsoft’s 4th of July Trans-Atlantic assault on document standards

,----[ Quote ]
| With OOXML and XPS, Microsoft has chosen to not work with existing standards, 
| but to create new ones, as they have in their recent announcement on Web3S 
| instead of working with the rest of the industry on the Atom Publishing 
| Protocol. In the case of OOXML, this is a logical move on Microsoft’s part, 
| since it is an evolution of Microsoft’s XML strategy started with the 
| Microsoft Office 2003 version and ODF will be a technology diversion from 
| that strategy. With Microsoft controlling 90% of the office productivity 
| tools market and OOXML being the default file format for Microsoft Office 
| 2007, OOXML is likely to be widely-used.        
`----

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Newton/?p=16


Microsoft criticized for Open XML petition

,----[ Quote ]
| The petition is an attempt to make it appear that Open XML
| has "pseudo-grassroots" support, argues Mark Taylor, the
| founder of the Open Source Consortium.
`----

http://news.zdnet.com/2100-3513_22-6173625.html


Microsoft calls on UK public to raise the Office standard

,----[ Quote ]
| Microsoft is calling on the Great British public to join its campaign
| to get the XML Office format adopted as an international standard.
| 
| [...]
| 
| It is not clear if the UK is an opponent. However, a representative
| of fellow member the Bureau of Indian Standards recently reportedly
| complained to the IndiaTime.com over Microsoft's decision to dump
| 6,000 pages of documentation on them.
`----

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/04/04/microsoft_office_standards_petition/

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