Microsoft Receives Open Source VIP Blessing 198
* * Beatles-Beatles writes to let us know that Larry Rosen has given his blessing to the new terms that Microsoft is Making their Office XML Reference Schema available under. Rosen, "the attorney that wrote the book on open source licensing and the man who was the Open Source Initiative's first general counsel and secretary," described this move as the "most significant olive branch to date" to come from the Redmond software giant.
Submitter is a link spammer-stop posting his stuff (Score:5, Interesting)
Am I the only person who has noticed the numerous stories that get posted by *--Beatles-Beatles? Am I also the only person who has noticed that the link used in is name is a constantly changing URL (depending on the story) with pointers to various scammy sites? Is it not obvious what he's doing? He's using the awesome PageRank of slashdot do promote his sites based on searches that have the word Beatles in them.
It's a small price to pay for free advertising. Find a story, summarize it in 5 minutes, post to slashdot, and get a pagerank boost that advertisers would pay hundreds (or maybe thousands) for. (Text links on high-ranking sites is big business - just ask oreilly).
Slashdot should at least put a ref=nofollow in the links to submitters (or better yet, only link the submitter's name to his/her user page).
In closing, a quick bit of WHOIS shows that all the sites linked by **B-B are registered to Carl Fogle. Carl, cut this crap out.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Standard - oh my. (Score:3, Interesting)
No, we don't.
As the time flies, I'm getting more and more convinced that OSI is actually harming our cause. While RMS sometimes has bad ideas as well (GFDL, GPLv3), Free Software is the way to do. Not the collestion of look-but-not-touch-and-we-reserve-all-rights-to-s
Re:Submitter is a link spammer-stop posting his st (Score:2, Interesting)
There are two possible explanations:
1. There are no submissions. SM = BB
2. BB is using some kind of automated RSS to email facility to submit stories, and SM is either clueless or in cahoots with BB
Jake.
Re:Who? (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, in fact, yes I have. That's how it was originally.
Re:Back in Mass. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Isn't XML readable anyways? (Score:4, Interesting)
True, but you gave a bad example, as you were illustrating how embedded binary information can look incomprehensible, which is irrelevant.
XML can be made difficult to read through the use of meaningless tag names or attributes.
The point of XML is that it can be made easily human readable (and good XML should be) - in fact this was one of the original design considerations.
Re:No rotation for me... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Submitter is a link spammer-stop posting his st (Score:5, Interesting)
I do, and apparently many others. The problem isn't one guy posting stuff with links to his various websites. That's ok.
The problem is a potential collaboration between this guy and a
And that's where it crosses the line. It certainly is interesting to see that all of his postings were approved by Scuttlemonkey. Coincidence? Maybe. Maybe not.
And then on the other hand.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Here is a dumb thought (Score:5, Interesting)
Don't click on his|her link.
Except it doesn't matter whether anyone here clicks on the link, google's pagerank system is the one "clicking on the link" - the end result being an increase in the guy's ranking in google so that people who don't even know what slashdot is will see the guy's site come up in searches for "beatles" and they will click on the link through google instead.
Note: Rosen talks about 2003 XML, not Office 12 (Score:4, Interesting)
As I understand it (imperfectly, for sure) there are legaly significant differences between the XML schema for Office 2003 and the upcoming Office 12.
Isn't this a Microsoft Bait-and-Switch? They make enough changes in terms on the legacy Office 2003 schema to continue their lock-in in Mass., but when the state has to update to Office 12 new patented and licensed "extensions" will lock out any competitive options.
Make no mistake, locking out others and maintaining position as The Monopoly is the business plan here.
Re:Back in Mass. (Score:3, Interesting)
Microsoft's track record is one of abusing their monopoly, to abuse their customers. If they're 'responding to the market' they must think that their corporate doomsday clock is at 11:59pm.
So there! (sorry for that last bit, but I just wanted to use *all three* forms of they're/their/there correctly in one post (another sign of the apocalypse)).
Re:Back in Mass. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Submitter is a link spammer-stop posting his st (Score:2, Interesting)
Given the fact that I couldn't locate his site in the first 10 pages of a google search for "beatles", I'd say he does a botch-up job of that and we can safely ignore him.
This is a storm in a teapot (or how ever you say that).
Re:Submitter is a link spammer-stop posting his st (Score:3, Interesting)
Perhaps, purchase a subscription? Not when I'm treated that way...
Re:Isn't XML readable anyways? (Score:4, Interesting)
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20051125
I'll let you judge for yourself how good or bad it is:
MS XML />
</w:rPr>
<w:t>this is bold</w:t>
</w:r>
<w:r> <w:rPr> <w:b
OpenDocument
<text:span text:style-name="Strong_20_Emphasis"> this is bold </text:span>
XHTML
<b>this is bold</b>
I am confused ... (Score:2, Interesting)
Maybe we need to grow up (Score:5, Interesting)
Why should software be different than nuts and bolts? Large detailed standards are not a bad thing. Now, if you can show that ODF is poorly designed compared with Microsoft's format, then I will listen. From the review of the two formats on Groklaw, I am actually inclined to prefer ODF to Microsoft's Office XML. ODF uses XLink, rather than reinventing that wheel, and ODF allows for mixed content (text and tags within the same parent tag) just like (X)HTML.