Aside from my quibbles that multiple implementations or "uses XML" should not really be part of the definition of an open format, there is not a clear way to interpret the bill as excluding OOXML, the format MS rammed through as an ISO standard to compete with ODF. So if the intent is to support ODF and disallow OOXML, I don't see that this will do it. (The bill as written requires documents to be an open document format, which the bill defines as one that is XML, open, interoperable across platforms and applications, published without restrictions or royalties, independently implemented by multiple SW providers, controlled by an open industry organization -- could arguably apply to both ODF and OOXML.)

And boy oh boy, is Aman Batheja, the author of the Star Telegram article, confused. First of all, he confuses "open document formats" and "open source." He writes, "State Rep. Marc Veasey is pushing lawmakers to require all state agencies to create and share their electronic documents in open-source formats." The bill has nothing to do with open source, or programming of any kind! The bill simply states that the file format for DOCUMENTS should be open, like ODF (and unlike, .doc/.ppt).

He goes on, in his confusion, "It could also mean that many state workers may see familiar Microsoft products such as Word and Excel replaced with lesser-known competitors on their work computers." Again, wrong. MS Office 2007 already has an ODF plugin, so you can read and save to ODF formats from within MS Office if you want to keep using MS Office.

No, I don't wonder. I realize that MS has been effective as hoodwinking many people into believing they are a "good" monopoly.

Or were you talking about the other part, you know, where I stated some facts about the ad campains? Well, facts are pesky things. I'm sorry the "He's linux" commercial that debuted during the Superbowl in 2004 predates the "I'm a Mac" (2006-) and "I'm a PC" (2007-) series. Fine, tune that out. Good luck with that.

Not quite -- the "he's linux" commercial preceeded either the Mac or PC ad series. Perhaps the only usual thing is that Apple and MS take undeserved credit.

I found http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwL0G9wK8j4 to be a fully working team, coached by Wooden no less.

No, we can criticize MS because we've proven in court they illegally use their monopoly to extinguish competition in other areas, and Apple because they lock down both their hardware and software. Linux is the best open source OS there is, and anyone who cares about software freedom ought to care about it.

That is a funny reply to the Mac ad series, but have people already forgotten the great linux ad which *preceded* either the Mac or PC ad series? Here it is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwL0G9wK8j4 It includes Mohommad Ali, Sylvia Nasar, Penny Marshall, and former UCLA basketball coach John Wooden.

Before trying to get a nice, clean installation of MS Office on linux, how about we wait until a nice, clean installation of MS Office is available for Windows? I haven't seen anything nice or clean yet. MS Office can't even open its own, older files securely (and so MS doesn't allow it to try), and file format isn't documented so any application that wants to interoperate resorts to reverse engineering. Did you see the piece of crap MS put together for their OOXML "standard"? It's an order of magnitude longer than ODF -- see, e.g., http://government.zdnet.com/images/ooxml.JPG

While there may be people like this, it is a very small minority. The vast majority of people who grew up with records moved to CD's and preferred the obvious quality improvement.

That people prefer MP3 indicates to me that they either have problems physically hearing (loss of high frequency hearing) or mentally they filter out imperfections of MP3. Hardly anyone explicitly likes distortion.

Anyway, I never understood why people, even young people, like a proprietary format like MP3 when OGG is free and at least as good. The success of the iPod, with it's non-support for OGG and its DRMed music, is a testimony that great marketing can convince people that lipstick on a pig turns it into a supermodel.

Not really. From the article, in order to even start the process you have to pay parkingticket.com a deposit equal to 50% of the ticket fine. Here is what can happen:

• If the ticket is dismissed, parkingticket.com keeps the 50% you paid them
• If the ticket is reduced, parkingticket.com retains 50% of what you saved
• If the ticket is dismissed, parkingticket.com will refund the deposit and pay 10% of the ticket

I guess if you're into paying a 50% fee for having someone fill out the paperwork, it's a good deal.

Briefly, in the 1990's MS was found to have a monopoly in its OS, which is not illegal in and of itself, but that it also illegally used its monopoly OS to create barriers to entry in other competitive areas. Particularly, it illegaly tied its browser to the OS, making other browsers not function as well (e.g., for help file viewing) and more difficult to install. At trial, they were shown to be either liars or, if you are very generous, incompetent.

Detailed findings of fact found illegal anti-competitive behavior in multiple areas, and their punishment was to be broken up into several companies. On appeal, MS successfully got that ruling overturned, on the basis that the judge in the case had made some negative comments about MS prior to issuing his ruling. In the meantime, 15 separate cases against MS brought by state attorneys general were merged, and MS settled with them for something so trivial no one remembers what it was. California, New York, and maybe one or two other states held out and separately obtained billion dollar settlements.

Shortly after the break-up order was rescinded, George W. Bush came into office and all efforts to obtain a reasonable remedy were dropped. MS essentially got off scott-free, in the sense that they illegally transformed their OS monopoly into a browser monopoly, with all the due profit that entailed, and weren't punished at all except for what they had to pay their lawyers and a billion to California.

To summarize and answer your question: Not Much.

They treated the people who got them where they were like kings. You must not have been one of the hundreds of people they invited into their mega-IPO who had nothing to do with RH other than that they happened to contribute to open source code that RH distributed. I've never seen any company with the ethics of RH, willing to give up money on the table to help the people who helped them.

Users who bought all those RH CD's from the early days and wanted to stick with a RH distribution simply moved on to Fedora Core 1. And if you were paying for support as you say, then RHEL would be no different than what you were doing under RHL 9. I don't see what anyone is complaining about.

Oh, so you've stopped using the kernel, ext3, Xorg, usb, glib, glibc, gcc, gnome, KDE, nautilus, gconf, dbus, hal, NetworkManager, coreutils, parted, grub, rpm, yum, anaconda, kudzu, ntsysv, and firefox? If not, you haven't left Red Hat. They write, maintain, or make major contributions to all of these areas, and you're using RH whether you're using their branded distribution or not.

I am grateful for all that RH has done and is continuing to do for linux.

The article seems to conflate "desktop" and "desktop virtualization."

RH has been on the desktop since the beginning. They offered Red Hat Linux 1.0 in 1995, all the way up through RHL 9 in 2003. They followed that with 10 bleeding-edge releases of Fedora and five main releases of RH Enterprise Linux. All 100% open, including their own work on utilities, Gnome/KDE, and kernel development. They have done more for linux on the desktop than just about any other company. And now we all reap the benefit, even if we use another distribution like Ubuntu.

So it is nonsense to say RH "returns" to the desktop. They never left.

Now, the article goes on to talk a lot about desktop *virtualization.* That's a totally different topic. Maybe the article should have been titled RH returns to desktop virtualization.

The freedom to sell their own product without interference ended for Netscape when Microsoft choked off their air supply by illegally tying IE to their monopoly OS. Continuing to allow the illegal tying doesn't increase freedom or competition.

Because MS is an OS monopoly that illegally ties its browser to its OS. It's difficult to get away from Windows and IE, because of their anticompetitive behavior. That's the whole point of the EU decision!

What are you talking about? OpenOffice.org implements ODF perfectly well.

Sorry, but it is vendor lock-in when the file format is not published and has to be reverse engineered. That wouldn't be a problem if the software were well written, but it isn't. MS Office isn't even compatible with itself, as it refuses to open old Word files because MS has determined Office can't do it in a secure fashion. OOo is so far ahead of MS Office that OOo can open the old Word files MS Office won't!

The part that doesn't allow one to remove IE.