Monday, January 12, 2009

OOXML, Wikipedia, and whitewashing

Image representing Microsoft as depicted in Cr...
Image via CrunchBase


I'm still pissed about OOXML, and the standardisation process.

Have a read of the wikipedia article.

That certainly doesn't sound like my understanding of it - there's about 3 lines of content throughout the entire thing talking about the criticism of it, and the standards process.

What the?
You would thinks that at least the technical arguments against OOXML would fit somewhere on the main page, wouldn't you.

So, delving deeper; we discover this is mainly due to one editor with a hard on for OOXML.

His about page doesn't tell you much, except:
"From that work I have various interest in interapplication communication, real time and batch textual data interfaces, electronic archiving, datawarehousing and flexible data in documents (of which we produce millions every year)."


If you look at his edits, it's all very pro-microsoft, ever since he joined the site.

Now that's not a bad thing by itself - after all, it might just be his area of expertise; but to have a minuscule amount of criticism over a file format which created street protests during the standardisation process; primarily due to his efforts - that's just not on.

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1 comment:

The Open Sourcerer said...

hAl is well known. Take a look around at the comments he has made on blogs such as: Alex Brown (the bloke who forced OOXML through the BRM), Doug Mahugh (The Microsoft employee who also represents other countries' national standards bodies when the need suits), Rob Weir and many others.

Yes, I have never seen a derogatory comment on M$/OOXML from hAl.