You know, I can tolerate Microsoft giving away laptops to bloggers. Who wouldn’t want a free, top of the line laptop with Windows Vista and Office 2007 installed on it? No need to pay for a license. But when people called this a bribe, Microsoft said the bloggers had to give the laptop away or return it to Microsoft when they’d finished using it for review purposes. I mean, come on. If Microsoft gave me a laptop for free, I’d never write the review until the next version of Windows was released. ;-)

But then, on Wednesday I see this pop up in one of my subscribed mailing lists from Oreilly. Now we’re getting into dangerous territory.

As a regular participant at ISO standards, on and off for more than a decade at my own expense, it has always frustrated me that the big companies would not come to the table and make use of ISO’s facilities. So I am a big fan of the Mass. governments push that governments should use standard formats only. I know some of the ODF people, I had some nice emails with the ODF editor over Christmas for example, and Jon Bosak asked me to join the original ODF initiative at OASIS (I couldn’t due to time, unfortunately.)

So I was a little surprised to receive email a couple of days ago from Microsoft saying they wanted to contract someone independent but friendly (me) for a couple of days to provide more balance on Wikipedia concerning ODF/OOXML. I am hardly the poster boy of Microsoft partisanship! Apparently they are frustrated at the amount of spin from some ODF stakeholders on Wikipedia and blogs.

An interesting offer: get paid to contribute to Wikipedia – Rick Jellife

Now, heres the issue. I have no problem at all with Microsoft themselves going and editing those posts on Wikipedia to balance them out a little. Thats not a problem. Anyone is allowed to do that. Thats the whole point of a wiki in the first place.

But I seriously draw the line at hiring someone external to the company to do the work for them. If Microsoft doesn’t like what is being said about them, they should fix it themselves and stand up for what they write.

Having a 3rd party go along and correct the information on sites like Wikipedia makes it seem like Microsoft is yet again trying to keep their hands from getting dirtied. If the person makes a mistake that is discovered at a later date, Microsoft can claim the mistake was that persons alone and they had nothing to do with it.

I do agree, the fight of ODF vs OOXML is just getting way out of hand. People, ODF is already a standard now and if you want to use ODF you are quite freely welcome to do so. There is nothing at all that should stop you from doing so. Its the default format for several office suites and desktop applications already available on the market. Both free and paid for.

The fight for ODF should not be fought in the standards process. It should be fought in the minds of businessmen. My convincing more businesses to use it, you increase the likelihood of ODF becoming the dominant file format.

And its free to do so.

Everyone needs to stop and take a few deep breaths I think.

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