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He is not "pro" anything. He always tries to be objective, so he sees things from afar, rather than getting all psyched with his own position, or OSS' position, or Microsoft's position. This is why I like Miguel.

I really really respect Miguel. Although he is an idealist he is also practical. He wants good tech just as much as he wants ideology(freedom).

Futhermore he never seems to have allready choses sides on anything. He always considers and he sees good and bad on both sides. *As is it (obviously) really is*

Agreed, but it seems to me that Miguel is always on the pro-Microsoft side of any camp that he respectfully belongs to.

Ditto. He's a pragmatic and objective guy.

Nope.
IMHO you have to be pro-MS to say OOXML is a superb standard ( Cause the 6000 page blob riden monster obviously isnt! )

http://groups.google.com/group/tiraniaorg-blog-comments/browse_thre...

Miguel seems to have a peculiar bug in his firmware which might be expressed as:

while True:
>>if provider == microsoft:
>>>>technology.category = "cool"
>>>>implement_for_linux(technology)
>>>>claim(NO_LEGAL_PROBLEMS, technology)
>>>>set_warnings(off)
>>>>ignore(signals, ALL)

('twould be nice if we had [code][/code] tags.)

Edited 2008-03-08 00:02 UTC

He is free to like Microsoft technologies and implement them. Novell is free to throw money at the projects. The developers are free to work on them. And you, the distros, and the other projects are free not to include their code in your Linuxes fearing Microsoft patent claims.
In the end it is beliefs vs practical needs. RMS and Theo the Raadt don't like the binary blobs you use for practical reasons(eg. you want 3d games). You don't like Microsoft technology, but some people will want to write word documents in Linux and compile .NET apps.

if you read his full reasoning on it here http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2007/Jan-30.html, you will see that his opinion on OOXML is well reasoned, and coming from his position as the creator of the most used spreadsheet in the free software world, not as the VP of a company which has partnered with MS.

Is it?

1. He tries to defend the 6000 pages of OOXML by trying to somehow argue that this gives us more detail than we've ever had before from Microsoft. Alas, those 6000 pages are largely a dump of the huge number of quirks of Microsoft Office, and gives little away in terms of how to actually implement them.

2. He tries to argue that with the information available on formulas in ODF that formulas simply cannot be implemented. However, given that Lotus, Open Office, KOffice, Google and Corel are all implementing ODF formulas, and there is feedback into improving and changing ODF in successive versions, his evidence for this is thin on the ground. I don't see anyone that has managed to implement the functions and formulas system as specified in OOXML, apart from that which has already been reverse engineered from Excel, which ironically makes the job easier. That doesn't make the spec any better, however.

3. He tries to criticise Groklaw for keeping track of problems and inconsistencies with OOXML. He tries to point out that OOXML references seven ISO standards where ODF only references three. While I can't verify that off-hand, that isn't the point. The fact is that OOXML comes up with, and references a lot of Windows-only implemented technology at the moment, where existing ISO or other standards could have been logically used to better benefit. He completely ignores the W3C standards that ODF uses as well.

4. He tries to claim that the information for Windows Metafiles is publicly available. WMF is a one-to-one mapping of Windows API calls. He would vote to add such information to the specification, but of course, Microsoft hasn't and won't do this. The complete lack of any amendments to OOXML after comments have been submitted shows this up. ODF, on the other hand, has successive versions.

5. He tries to give a weak justification as to why SVG shouldn't be used. Basically, he argues that it's too much work and would pull in too many other W3C specs. Incredible. However, other developers are using SVG now, or are at least using a subset of it, and if Microsoft actually had a web engine that adhered to many W3C standards properly then they wouldn't have such a problem.

6. He tries to argue that it is within reach to bring XAML and WPF to non-Windows platforms, but this just shows up where Miguel conceptually just doesn't get it. You can get 20%, 40%, 60% or even 80% of what Microsoft has implemented, but you can never have a situation where you have a 100% drop-in replacement. As Microsoft will also be first with any new implementation, you can never, ever be on a par with what they're doing. That's not what standards are about.

7. Like people like Rick Jelliffe, he brings up the response to OOXML's 6000 pages that seems to be doing the rounds - OOXML uses 1.5 line spacing versus ODF's single spacing! If this isn't straw grasping, I don't know what is.



I wasn't aware that he wrote Open Office Calc.



There's no evidence for that I'm afraid.

Yeah and have to be pro[something] to think [insert opinion].

I know this is always true. I can see their thoughts!

Eugenia, I agree with you Miguel is not pro anything. Possibly dealing with Microsoft and expecting the relationship to be beneficial to each party is usually a mistake. Microsoft deals with others when it has the upper hand.

Edited 2008-03-08 00:24 UTC

I'm not entirely sure who you've got him mixed up with. For good or for bad, and people can come up with all the conspiracy theories they like, he has always had a puzzling and burning admiration for what Microsoft comes up with. Whether it be Gnumeric and Excel, Mono and .Net or support for OOXML, he is anything but objective. His bizarre support for OOXML was widely discredited, and around the time Mono was created he even started regurgitating a lot of Microsoft marketing material on .Net, such as ASP.Net being used to write 80% less code than anything else.

It just appears that Miguel is now backtracking somewhat, and if you read the debate:

http://www.linuxworld.com/news/2008/030608-mix-novells-de-icaza-cri...

A lot of it looks quite painful and difficult to reconcile. He even comes up with this gem:



Owning end users? That's not really a logical response to..........anything.

"I'm not entirely sure who you've got him mixed up with."

Miguel and Eugenia know each other personally and they're having the same stance which might originate in their natural naivety but is a part of their economical model now.

Edited 2008-03-10 10:34 UTC

Either the guy is bought by Microsoft or incredibly naive.

You are confusing "does not have a rabid, irrational hatred for" with "pro".

"That's an interesting development because DeIcaza is usually pro Microsoft."

It could also be a PR stunt; they were quiet for some time.

No. It just makes it so horrendously and obviously bad that even Miguel can't credibly rationalize it.