Various narrow interest groups are seeking to manipulate open standards to favour their own view of the world.
http://www.noooxml.org/start
Sign the petition.
I mean, how can something like "autoSpaceLikeWord95" be in an ISO standard. What else is in there, 8.3 filename support?
And what's with all the promises of "not to sue". It sounds just like a promise of "not to bite" from a cobra. You just know that isn't going to work in the long run.
When (eventually) Microsoft is no more, or it decides that it is no longer in it's economic interest to support this, then everything which uses this will find itself up the creek without a paddle.
Microsoft lives and dies by it's continual churn in file formats. There is no reason to think they won't tinker with this, or abandon it.
A true open standard should be implementable by anybody, for perpetuity.
Not by one company for as long as it is beneficial to them.
In the same vein, EU residents might want to mozey over to here as well.
http://openstandards.wikidot.com/main-en
