ZDNet UK’s knowledgeable security blogger, Tom Espiner, has posted a piece about the responses of ACT and Red Hat to ISO’s recent approval of OOXML as an open standard for electronic documents. Tom seems to take the position of Red Hat as the right honest gospel, not wasting a single keystroke contextualizing or questioning the company’s assertions or analysis.

When it came to our point of view, however, his loquaciousness took over.  He decided to characterize what ACT’s positions are, recite some old accusations about us, and finally admit those accusations are false.  He then goes onto to offer a few snarky responses to ACT president Jonathan Zuck’s statement. 

I’m not his editor, so I won’t continue harping on his inequitable verbosity, but I would like to correct a few mistakes and respond to some assertions he makes.

  1. ACT Has NEVER lobbied to "limit free and open source software uptake in government."  Much like some in the Bush administration, certain aspects of the FLOSS community take the "you’re with us, or your against us" approach to silencing anyone that questions their tactics.  ACT supports and has always supported governments using FLOSS software.  We believe that government CIOs should be able to choose the software that best meets their needs regardless of licensing model.  That is why we have actively lobbied against government MANDATES for using FLOSS software.  Unfortunately, that is often distorted by the aforementioned FLOSS/Bushies into being against open source.
  2. Tom’s Right!  We do think that "reports that OOXML is not interoperable with versions of Windows prior to Vista are overblown."  Did Rob Weir tell you that?  You know he works at IBM and is paid full time to spread FUD against OOXML, right?  While Rob has discussed legitimate issues in the past, this one is ridiculous.  To begin with, I write the vast majority of my documents on a MacBook Air running Leopard/Office 2008 and save them without problem to OOXML.  My colleague Braden is running XP/Office 2003 and is able to open, edit, and save those OOXML files flawlessly.  Heck, Morgan can even read them on his iPhone.  So, yes… those reports are overblown at best.
  3. We Didn’t Start the Fire…but We did Call a Spade a Spade. IBM and Co. have been running a non-stop FUD campaign with the theme "if you’re not with us, you’re against us."  They have been in slash-and-burn mode for months, incessantly fanning the flames of Microsoft haters and Free Software advocates around the world.  In losing, they are now trying to blame ISO and Microsoft’s hard-nosed lobbying for their loss at ISO.  Sure, Microsoft fought hard for this and some employees probably went over the line (although many of the claims seem to ravings of sore losers, see Norway and Germany), but it is also clear that something much more was at play.  OOXML wasn’t just approved, it was approved overwhelmingly.  Rather than blaming the loss on conspiracy theories, it would seem wise that IBM et al would be better served by looking in the mirror for the real answer. 

Just think about this…their campaign against OOXML became so nasty, so divisive that IBM drove the ISO editor of ODF into the pro-OOXML camp. ODF’s editor has decided to SUPPORT standardization of OOXML…again, resist the urge to simply attack him for daring to question the evilness of OOXML, and think about that for a second.

When you start driving away your closest friends…you should start rethinking your strategy, not start trashing your friend.  So, when Jonathan said, "The efforts of IBM, Sun, and their allies to polarize and politicize this technical standards process seem to have blown up in their faces," he was simply calling a spade a spade.