Foundationless
I’ve not bothered to comment on the issue here, but Rob Weir has an excellent analysis of the recent unraveling of the OpenDocument Foundation, which at this point appears to be three people: Gary Edwards, Marbux, and Sam Hiser. Sam has a weak rebuttal that only reinforces one of Rob’s points: the self-righteous, self-serving, completely delusional belief that these three alone have all the solutions to the complex problems of interoperability, that they are somehow the torch-bearers of freedom, and that anyone that disagrees with them on anything is part of some conspiracy to deny the world a better future.
What’s really sad is that some journalists actually believe this rhetoric without any apparent further investigation. For example, Linux Today concludes in an example of shockingly bad and unsubstantiated journalism that:
… regardless of how “right” people think ODF is over OOXML, it’s still just one more thing for big vendors to fight about. In the end, Gary and the Foundation are saying, it’s the customers that lose out, trying to get their documents opened.
Did they talk to David Faure or Thomas Zander from the KOffice project? Obviously not. How about former Foundation members like Patrick Durusau? Nope.
When Marbux (a man who hides behind a pseudonym) started being abusive on the ODF TC lists and threatening lawsuits and to fork ODF, I wrote at the time that I would publicly call it as I saw it: as an unprincipled effort at extortion. I will continue to do that. Unfortunately for the conspiracy theorists at the Foundation, it will be hard for them to explain away my position by reference to some corporate conspiracy. But I post it here for the record.
