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Exploring Choice

DannyO_0x98 23rd Feb 2008

Open source folks love choice, because the supply of programmers who think they
can do better is endless. sendmail vs. postfix, kde vs. gnome, konqueror vs. firefox,
perl vs. python. mySql vs. postgresql. vi vs. emacs. netbeans vs. eclipse. freeBSD vs.
netBSD vs. openBSD. Go to a package manager in Ubuntu (there's choice there) and
search for office software packages. Shoot, look for sound editors, and notice that
they all support mp3, wav/aiff, and ogg.

As for the final paragraph, we have a document standard, odf, and there are, let's
call them vendors, and users. I don't see any sulking withdrawals from the prize
not reached.

If anything OOXML is an end around large public institutional customers who were
troubled by the expense of locked-in file formats and who were starting to do
something about it. An ISO imprimatur on OOXML doesn't make the problem or the
costs go away and so, at best, this has been a way to give a short-term talking
point to its dispatched lobbyists, in short, a defensive, stalling action on
Microsoft's part. We've been seeing quite a few of those from Redmond the past
couple of years.