Beware of Microsoft!

It is well-known that using Microsoft products is risky because of many reasons. Just to refresh your memory, Microsoft Windows (of any flavour) is the most insecure operating system. Viruses, of course, are well-known, but most people do not realise that viruses are a problem only in MS Windows. A kind of malicious software called Trojans is, perhaps, more dangerous. It takes out information about what your computer contains. Then there is the risk of the computer suddenly refusing to respond, requiring a reboot, and possibly causing loss of data. There is nothing new in all these, though most people think that all computers are like this.

But here is another threat now. Apparently, Microsoft released a patch some time back that has made the browser Firefox risky to use. Of course, it made their own Internet Explorer also risky, but that has always had plenty of security holes, so one more was not a big thing. Firefox is considered to be more secure even on Windoze, but apparently Microsoft's patch has made it vulnerable to attacks. You don't have to take my word for it, you can read the story in Computer World. It says, "An add-on that Microsoft silently slipped into Mozilla's Firefox last February leaves the browser open to attack, Microsoft's security engineers acknowledged earlier this week." We should thank Microsoft for acknowedging the fact.

Apparently, the plug-in could be installed without the knowledge of the user. And once installed, it was not at all easy to remove it. The usual "Disable" button seen for each plug-in would itself be disabled. And one had to wade through the Windows Registry (which is a risky thing to do and not recommended for normal users to do) to remove the plug-in. It is unclear whether this happened unwittingly or whether it was a deliberate move on the part of Microsoft to put a brake on the steady increase in popularity that Firefox has been showing at the expense of Internet Explorer. I would have thought that the former could be true, though I wouldn't put the latter beyond Microsoft, but for one reason: that Microsoft has done things that many businessmen would never think of, and are possibly continuing to do such things too.

Let me tell you one such thing that they are probably doing. I was told that the Google desktop search tool is locked in Windows Vista. I have to admit that I have not tested this myself, since I really don't have a machine with Vista anywhere near me. It apparently requires the Windows key to be unlocked. Well, this could be a bug somewhere, but again, it could be deliberate too. MS certainly wouldn't want a Google software to become popular on their systems especially when they are in direct competition in the Net search area. Not that Bing is popular - certainly not anywhere near Google.

Another thing I was told is that Firefox runs slow on Windows. Well, as I said earlier, it could be accidental, or it could be deliberate. But with Microsoft, I would put my bet on the latter. As someone once told me, it is not that Microsoft engineers are fools. If they make it all very nice and perfect the first time itself, what will be the attraction in new versions? And where will be the antivirus business - something that Microsoft itself is planning to do?

Microsoft supports Apache Foundation

It seems Microsoft has contributed some money to the Apache Foundation. Unbelievable? See here. This, of course, naturally sets people thinking. About what Microsoft is up to. "Microsoft is putting a wide range of protocols that were formerly in the Communications Protocol Program under the Open Specification Promise (OSP). This guarantees their freedom from any patent claims from Microsoft now or in the future, and includes both Microsoft-developed and industry-developed protocols." says Groklaw. Things are getting curiouser and curiouser. What is Microsoft really up to?

Of course, we cannot expect M$ to have suddenly decided to support Free Software. Or can we? Look at it this way. GNU/Linux is eating into the desktop market of Microsoft. Distributions like Ubunutu and Mandriva are becoming very popular. And, though I don't have any statistics, I wouldn't be surprised if GNU/Linux has become the second most popular OS on the desktop. Some time back, Apple's OS X was the second most popular OS. And Microsoft had ported many of their applications to OS X. If that place has been taken by GNU/Linux, what prevents Microsoft from doing a similar thing? In fact why should they not? So I have a vague feeling that we may soon find "Microsoft Office for Linux" being marketed by M$. After all, their aim is to make money. And they will tell people that they can continue to use their "favourite" Office applications even if they migrate to GNU/Linux. I am pretty sure that there will be takers.

OK. Then where can they go from there? I guess they will make Firefox the default browser on Windows. In any case, Firefox is becoming increasingly popular even on Windows, and I remember having read somewhere that M$ is spending a lot of $ on IE development and getting nothing out of it. By putting Firefox, they save that money and can claim to have a very popular (or the most popular by that time?) browser by default. And they wind up the IE group in their company. And save money.
And, finally? Of course, they transform into a Free Software company. Which they will have to do, in any case. And with the money and user base they have, they can easily drive the others, such as Red Hat and SuSE out of business or at least become the dominant FS company. Not likely? Who can say? I feel that if they don't do that, then the chances are that the company would have to wind up. I don't see any other way in which they can survive the onslaught from Free Software.

India says NO to Microsoft OOXML

India has decided to vote against Microsoft's OOXML file format being accepted as an ISO standard in the meeting of the committee convened by the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS). Out of 19 members of the BIS committee, five did not attend the meeting, five voted in favour of OOXML and the rest (eight) voted against.

It is interesting to note that those who voted in favour of accepting OOXML as a standard were Wipro, TCS, Infosys, NASSCOM and, of course, Microsoft itself. As Anivar Aravind asks, "Did these companies vote purely in favour of their economic interests and against the national interest?" It appears to be that way. Thus the Open Document Format (ODF), a format that is already an ISO standard, will remain the only approved document format for India. BIS had earlier voted "No" with comments, and the present decision confirms this. For approval as ISO standard, at least two-thirds of the participating members (of which India is one) should vote "Yes" and only less than one-fourth of the total members should say "No". At present, only 53% of participating members have said "Yes" and 26% of all members have said "No", as per the report here. This means that OOXML cannot become an ISO standard. Hurray!

Congratulations to Prof. G. Nagarjuna (Chairperson, Free Software Foundation of India and Professor at the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education, TIFR, Mumbai), Venkatesh Hariharan of RedHat India, and others who worked hard to prevent a proprietary standard from being made an ISO standard.

Microsoft Responds

Microsoft has responded (see here) to my write-up about the need to adopt the Open Document Format. As may be expected, they are just trying to convince people with propaganda. Since Infochange is unwilling to publish my response to Microsoft's clarification, I have to do it here. So here goes:

Microsoft says, "At the outset, Microsoft software is completely interoperable."

I think this must be a joke. Just today, the media report (see here for a report in The Hindu) that Microsoft has been fined a record $1.35 billion by the European Commission regulators for not complying with their 2004 order related to an anti-trust case. The case was that Microsoft has been trying to avoid giving essential information required for interoperability to others by asking for a huge price. As the report says, "Microsoft was the first company in 50 years of EU competition policy that the commission has had to fine for failure to comply with an antitrust decision," Let me quote a couple of lines more from the report:

"Microsoft has tried to allay European antitrust concerns, announcing last week that it will help competitors' software work better with some products, such as MS Office.

It sought to limit potential EU fines by agreeing in October to make network data available to open-source software developers so their server software can connect to the Windows operating system."

Of course, they were willing to give all the information, apparently. But just ask for an enormous sum (not specified in the report) for it.

Microsoft says, "In fact Microsoft has consistently invested in helping customers integrate our platform and applications with a broad array of popular (and even not so popular) hardware, software and networks."

Really? Maybe they forgot to point this out to the EU? Sorry for the sarcasm. Genuinely. I have nothing against Microsoft or any other company, so long as they do not think that all others are total idiots.

Microsoft says, "We have partnered with Novell & Sun among others to ensure Windows interoperability across technology platforms."

Of course, that is old story. As though SuSe and Solaris are the only other operating systems people use. If Microsoft is really concerned about inter-operability, why not make the necessary information available to anyone? Why only to "partners"? What is Microsoft afraid of? They are, aren't they?

Microsoft says, "As a result of these efforts, Microsoft offers a comprehensive portfolio of interoperability software capabilities, from the operating system to individual applications. This development highlights our commitment to address customer interoperability needs, and that we acknowledge the mixed source environment needs of our customers. Our efforts are helping our customers run both Microsoft Windows and SUSE Linux Enterprise systems seamlessly together."

LOL! Sorry for that. Meenu Handa who wrote this, must have written it before the EC slapped a record fine on the company. She probably had no clue about what was coming, and therefore may be excused. So if one wants to run GNU/Linux and Microsoft Windows together, one better get SuSE. My God! They really seem to think that we all are idiots.

So far I have addressed only one paragraph in their response. I really do not have the patience to reply to the entire statement. Please read it. You may find it the biggest joke of the century. Hope you have a nice laugh.

India should adopt Free Standards

When Raghu could not open a document received via email from a friend abroad, he decided to call his colleague Harish who was the local troubleshooter for all kinds of problems related to computers. Harish took a look at the file and told Raghu that he would not be able to open it in Word because it was a Lotus WordPro document. Raghu was, naturally, taken aback. He could not understand what Harish was saying. So Harish explained to him that Word is only one of the several word processors being used on
computers, albeit the most popular one, and that WordPro was another. WordPerfect and OpenOffice Writer are others. All these, except the last, stored their documents in formats that are understood well only by the respective applications. So it often happens that a document created using one wordprocessor cannot be opened using another.

This is a problem that many people have been facing, though not very frequently. But this is a potentially serious problem in future, especially for the central and state governments. In most cases, documents are generated in proprietary formats such as that of Microsoft Word or Excel. Five years hence, if it becomes necessary to open one such document, two conditions will have to be satisfied: one that Microsoft still exists and their applications still allow you to open documents in these formats, and two, you have the required Microsoft application installed. Which means that you are bound to use Microsoft applications always–a phenomenon known as vendor lock-in.

However, in many other areas where we have been using technology products, we don’t face such problems. For instance, we still continue to use plugs, holders and other fittings installed twenty or more years back. We can still connect our modern gadgets to them without any problem. This is possible because of standardisation. There already existed standards when these fittings were made and we are following the same standards now. Unfortunately, there were no standards for documents generated using computers, till recently that is.

This may appear to be a minor problem especially in a country like India where few people use computers, but it is not. Imagine a huge database for e-governance built on a proprietary database. The company who provides the database could say one fine morning that they are moving to another format and they would not continue to provide support for the older version beyond a certain date. Similar things have actually happened. For instance, Microsoft told users of their older system, Windows NT, that they would not provide support beyond December 31, 2004, and that those who are using it should move to their newer system, namely, Windows 2000. This meant that those who were using Windows NT and were happy with it had to remove it and install the new system, which often meant replacing the computer itself, migrating all data (sometimes including applications) to the new system and retraining the staff–a very expensive exercise in many situations. But it could have been worse: suppose the company itself was to wind up!

So what is the solution? The solution is to have a standard format for all documents. This was, naturally, realised by users in the developed countries long before us, as a consequence of which we already have an ISO standard–the Open Document Format (ODF). This includes standards for text documents, spreadsheets, presentations and drawings. And this is a Free standard.

Now, what is a Free standard? A Free standard is a standard that is no one’s property. It belongs to the entire humanity and is not controlled by any person or organisation. It may appear strange that there can be standards that are controlled by someone. But this is possible. For instance, Microsoft has proposed a document standard known as OOXML (Office Open XML, where XML is a language that is becoming widely popular for formatting documents and stands for eXtended Markup Language). OOXML has been accepted as a standard by Ecma (originally, European Computer Manufacturer’s Association), a private standardisation body. It is now under consideration for acceptance as a standard by the International Standards Organisation (ISO) but has lost out at the first stage. OOXML is a proprietary format of Microsoft and someone who wants to implement it will require their licence. This is one of the reasons why organisations like the Free Software Foundation and industries like Google and IBM are fighting against the acceptance of OOXML as an ISO standard.

India has voted against OOXML at the preliminary stage. Along with several other countries, India also has given comments that point to aspects of OOXML that are not acceptable to the country. Dr. G. Nagarjuna, Professor at the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education, TIFR, Mumbai, and Chairperson of the Free Software Foundation of India, who was a member of the committee that decided upon India’s stand in the matter, says that Microsoft had submitted a six thousand page document for evaluation. Since they had asked for (and were given) the fast track route for acceptance, the time available for people to respond was just about one month. This was probably done deliberately so that people would not find the time to study the document, necessarily a highly technical one, in detail and find out the problems. In spite of this, teams in India and several other countries burnt the midnight oil to go through the document carefully and come up with major objections, at least some of which Microsoft may find difficult to counter. They get another opportunity to defend themselves against the criticism. If they are able to respond satisfactorily to the criticism raised by the various parties, then OOXML could become an ISO standard.

But India and other countries have the option of deciding upon the standard they will follow. And this should be a Free standard like ODF. Regions like the state of Massachusetts have already adopted this standard. If OOXML becomes an ISO standard, there is bound to be a lot of pressure on the governments to adopt it. We should not make that mistake.