[odf-discuss] Fwd: W3C Lead on CDF says OpenDocument Fellowship Position on CDF Makes No Sense

[Pamela Jones]

The fact that there are indeed clueless businesspeople who will absorb 
FUD and then play it back in no way absolves those those sent it forth 
into the world in the first placed.

I do not join in your vision or your call.  I hold both Microsoft and 
Novell responsible for planting the poisonous idea that only one type of 
Linux is "safe" to use. And I'm ashamed of those who enable that FUD.

And I believe Novell is behind a great deal of the current strife, 
precisely because they are selling their brand of Linux as "the Linux 
that works with Microsoft" as opposed to Red Hat, the one that doesn't. 
  Novell's Justin Steinman admitted, nay, bragged, that this was how 
they sell it.

If that isn't fragmentation of the community, I'd like to know what is. 
  No, it isn't that Microsoft was forced to work with Linux. It's that 
Microsoft is forcing partnerships on Linux companies that would have 
preferred to avoid it, by means of patent threats.

And the ultimate purpose is to permit Microsoft to get money from those 
partnerships. It has nothing to do with spreading Linux to them. Look 
what happened to Linspire after the deal. It got worse.

And the per seat thing. And the restrictions on noncommercial coders. 
It's designed to destroy.

It's an attack on the method of software development and on the GPL, the 
lifeblood of the ecology, the two things Microsoft can't beat and can 
only provide a Brand X version of.  Well, there's a third thing they 
can't even pretend to offer: the community's values.

By turning their backs on those values, those who support Microsoft's 
patent strategy are deliberately dividing the community, for money. 
That's it. It has nothing to do with the community except to say that 
they don't care about how it feels or even about how the authors of the 
code they wish to use for money said they would permit their code to be 
used. It's only the "extremists" that make a fuss, they say. Well, it's 
not.  They are ripping off the community. Period.

So those who wish to be partners and friends of Microsoft are free to do 
whatever they please, but don't pretend that the relationship with the 
community can ever be the same.
Christian Einfeldt wrote:
> I am a little bit concerned about fragmentation of both the FOSS community.
> I am not addressing this comment to any one particular person on this list.
> Rather, my comments here are more general in nature.
> 
> I