In the meantime, when it comes to "smears" Vaughan Nichols could have learned a bit from Sun's former CEO, Scott McNealy:
"You're all on notice - the whole industry knows now that there may be some intellectual property issues around [Linux]," he said in August 2003.
At any time in the past five years, the OASIS ODF TC could have slammed the door shut on MS OOXML simply by adopting a short set of interoperability enhancements designed to establish ODF compatibility with existing Microsoft documents, and interoperability with existing Microsoft applications and bound processes. Sun has blocked these iX efforts at every turn, creating a real world need for the OOXML MSOffice conversion plug-in.
In 2004, Syn signed an interoperability-patent-hardware compatibility deal with Microsoft worth over $2 Billion. Microsoft financial statements continue to cite a substantial quarterly markdown due to continued payments to Sun.
Stephen Vaughn-Nichols is perhaps on to something bigger than he ever imagined. The problem is that this latest Microsoft gambit includes Novell, who also signed a billion dollar deal involving interoperability, file format compatibility and patent protection.
So, out of three main ODF vendors, two now have sweet sweet deals with Microsoft. Only IBM remains, and they were the target of the original SCO assault funded by Microsoft and Sun!
Why isn't IBM concerned about Sun's intentional limiting of ODF interoperability? Why isn't the world concerned that they can't convert existing MS documents, applications and processes to ODF without substantial loss of information?
As someone who has been at this since the first OASIS ODF TC meeting, December 14th, 2002, i want some answers.
IMHO, we've been had!
~ge~