Capitalism Mr Mitchell?

Mr Mitchell: I've seen a claim somewhere that the natural endpoint of capitalism is monopoly. Is that what you are defending? Monopoly by Microsoft? It sure seems like it.

I prefer capitalism oriented toward competition among a fairly large number of companies to supply compatible products. That way, if my state decides to use product XYZ to create government documents, I'm not forced to buy that same product in order to view them. THAT is what standards are for. The standard should insure interoperability by being completely open. Anyone should be free to implement the standard.

Yes, we want to ban Microsoft formats from being required in any government operation. Why should our public data be held hostage by Microsoft?

Microsoft is completely free to implement the ODF formats in their products. They refuse to do so. Microsoft is completely free (indeed, was encouraged) to participate in the definition (and future evolution) of ODF. They refused. If they have some features that can't be supported in ODF, I am confident that the committees maintaining ODF would be happy to consider and refine proposals from Microsoft that would extend ODF in a way that permitted Microsoft (and any other vendor) to implement those features in ODF-stored files.

Note that nobody is saying that Microsoft has to give away their software secrets. Nobody is saying that Microsoft cannot implement any private storage formats that they care to. The issue is that public data MUST be stored in completely open formats so that our data cannot be held hostage to Microsoft's business plans. OOXML is not even close to an open format.

ISO and its member bodies really shouldn't waste their time on this sham. Unfortunately, they will be forced to waste lots more time on this. In the end, I expect you and Microsoft will get your way and Microsoft's proprietary specification will be given an ISO standard number. Microsoft no doubt will pressure, bribe, threaten, smear enough people to wear down the opposition. I only hope that enough public attention will be kept on the whole, sordid campaign that people and their governments will realize that choosing to store their documents in OOXML is a bad long-term choice for them and will start to declare their independence from Microsoft by switching to software that natively uses ODF.