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[Sethu]

Friends

I will quote some URLs for references below after writing on my
observations found in web on current issues and directions for coming
years on documents standards related.

Microsoft itself is moving away from its traditional binary formats
(.doc, .xls etc.) with its Microsoft Open XML standards initiativefor
its next Office release. It will not be a FOSS standard but aparently
a "royalty free perputal licensensing" (MS is to use some "convenant")
but critics and legal experts have pointed out its likely purpose is
to keep away from competition true open standard, that is the xml
based Open Document standards (already ISO accepted) used by Open
Office, KOffice etc.

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts (that is the  government of that
Amercian state) decided by last year to impose the requirment that all
its state government agencies to use only open standards for their
documents formats and the deadline for conversion is the beginning of
2007.  Microsoft's existing  binary formats as well as upcoming MS
Open XML standards are not acceptable for them whereas FOSS products
such as Open Office that use Open Document standards are. Also PDF
with XML support for display / printing are also  accepted by that
state. Thus it appears Micro Soft Office suite will lose it place on
MS Windows platforms used by that state governmental agencies in
another 2 months

There are plenty of web site articles on these:

1. http://www.dwheeler.com/essays/why-opendocument-won.html
This is by one David Wheeler - writen in Spetmber 2005 and updated
during this September. I found it to be very interesting and
informative.

2.  http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,1000000121,39215912,00.htm
3. http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,1000000121,39216391,00.htm
4. http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1863060,00.asp

Above 2,3 and 4 are samples for how Massachsetts decision were covered
by web IT new sites in 2005

5. http://news.zdnet.com/2100-3513_22-5108018.html?tag=nl
6. http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1892757,00.asp

Above two on MS Open XML - #6 is a legal analyst's criticism

7. http://catb.org/esr/halloween/halloween1.html
8. http://catb.org/esr/halloween/halloween2.html

#7 and #8 above are annotated exposition by one Eric Raymond in 1998
on   confidential internal memorandum by a Microsoft internal team for
proposing startegies to comabt open source models. These two,
Halloween 1 and 2  are referneced in #1 above but the links that
author gives are no longer available so I found the above 2 on google
search

~Sethu

On 11/6/06, Tirumurti Vasudevan <agnihot3 at gmail.com> wrote:
> i have been sending the files only for our exchange.
[..]