[Ecommerce] Info- British Agency Shows Concern Over Microso ft’s Interoperability

[Manon Ress]

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[ Picked text/plain from multipart/alternative ]
Thanks to David Banisar for pointer.

Subject: Info- British Agency Shows Concern Over Microsoft’s
Interoperability

http://www.efluxmedia.com/news_British_Agency_Shows_Concern_Over_Microsofts=
_Interoperability_17560.html

British Agency Shows Concern Over Microsoft’s Interoperability

The British Educational Communications and Technology Agency (BECTA)
has filed a complaint to the European Commission regarding Microsoft’s
new file format, Open Office XML. The controversy issued over the fact
that products of other companies are working poorly with the new OOXML.
BECTA is interested to find out whether the software giant has
withheld information from its competitors on purpose. The issue is
even more interesting since it is possible that some improper
influence has been exerted over the International Standard
Organization (ISO) to accept OOXML as a standard together with the
older Open Document Format, a file format that was developed by Sun
Microsystems and that has its full specifications made public.

The British commission has asserted that because of Microsoft
products’ lack of interoperability, the British Educational System is
paying more money on software products than it should. In 2005, the
same commission published a study according to which British primary
schools could save up to half their costs if they would choose open
source software products, and give up the proprietary ones.

Another issue raised by the commission is the way Microsoft licenses
its products to the schools. The company’s policy is that all
computers in a campus must have Microsoft license. BECTA has
considered this an anticompetitive practice.

According to the Associated Press, Microsoft’s spokeswoman Anne-Sophie
de Brancion stated that “Microsoft is deeply committed to education
and interoperability”, and that the company has started to develop
tools that will enable Office to work better with files in ODF.



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Manon Ress
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