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  KDE's ISO Delegate Votes Yes to Office Open XML
KDE Office Suite Posted by Jonathan Riddell on Monday 31/Mar/2008, @14:49
from the sorry-rms dept.
This week saw the International Standards Organisation vote on adopting Office Open XML as a standard for office documents. KDE gained a representative late last year through our legal body KDE e.V. realising that the only way to ensure a fair process was to be part of it. Today our delegate voted yes to adopting the format as an international standard. "We have studied the standard hard and many changes have been made to it," said KDE's Supreme Leader Aaron Seigo "and following a $10,000 donation from an anonymous North American source we realised the market should decide the best formats to use, not technical bureaucrats".

The KOffice developers confirmed their support with Cyrille Burger saying, "The level of detail in this standard is very impressive, previous standards we had to deal with were less than half as expansive in their documentation. Working with a standard that makes such good use of previously established standards was also a main reason for the quick implementation in KOffice".

KDE founder Stephan Coolio was unavailable for comment because he was changing nappies.



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Over 40 comments listed. Printing out index only.
Timestamp
by LiquidFire on Monday 31/Mar/2008, @16:24
Heh, the timestamp of the post still says March 31, though :)

Had me for a second as I was wondering what the hell :)
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Cool!
by Lirpa on Monday 31/Mar/2008, @16:27
Finally! Now I can open that .docx thingies.

For some more MS interoperability it would be cool if KDE could support DirectX 11 in Plasma:

http://tech.slashdot.org/tech/08/03/31/1423247.shtml

A raytraced sun dial on the desktop would rock!
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Aww man!!
by PaT on Monday 31/Mar/2008, @16:35
You got me ;)

I was like, what the hell are they thinking? Are they going crazy?? And since when Seigo became "SUPREME" leader ;)

About 30 solid seconds of despair ;) Pheww....
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Naming standards
by Lord Hippo on Monday 31/Mar/2008, @16:59
"KDE's Supreme Leader Alan Psycho", surely?!
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So wait,... wha?
by Max on Monday 31/Mar/2008, @17:03
So wait?

Is this a joke?

I thought the world was against Microsoft's Office Open XML. Wasn't it?
I'm royally confused. I thought ODF was the open standard and Open XML wasn't. Did something change in the last month I stopped paying attention to the whole ODF vs. OOXML debate?

Why does KDE like OOXML now?

Must be an April fool's joke early..
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Supreme Leader Aaron Seigo
by Patcito on Monday 31/Mar/2008, @17:56
They should have linked the Supreme Leader part to this http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1196/747230218_ce3f728204.jpg?v=0 :D
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Ha
by Paulo Cesar on Monday 31/Mar/2008, @18:46
You almost got me :P
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the jokes on you!
by Vladislav on Monday 31/Mar/2008, @18:52
happy april fools day everybody :)
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AF1, of course...
by Anand Vaidya on Monday 31/Mar/2008, @19:45
For a moment I was shocked, that our beloved KDE Project can make such grave judgemental error.

But I was relieved after seeing the date on my plasma Clock.

:-)

Regards
Anand
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Supremer
by Bruno Laturner on Monday 31/Mar/2008, @20:11
Bah, komrade Jonathan just missed the chance to name komrade Seigo our Supreme Kommander.

Hopefully our faithful debugger KG[d]B agents will correct this bug.
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Cyrille Burger and Stephan Coolio?
by fred on Monday 31/Mar/2008, @20:30
Bah, I woke up this morning and saw this news, WTF?? But then I realized that this is 1st of April :D - Only the date in the dot.news is still 31 March.

Btw "Cyrille Burger" and "Stephan Coolio"? But why Aaron Seigo's name is the only correct one, not became for example Aaron Siege? :)
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Happy april fools
by Riddle on Monday 31/Mar/2008, @20:57
APRIL FOOLS!!!

... and following a $10,000 donation from an anonymous NA source ...
And who could that be! ;)
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Aha...
by Winter on Monday 31/Mar/2008, @21:02
I just love this community. Rock on!
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Go KDE Go!
by Kartik Mistry on Monday 31/Mar/2008, @21:32
I was waiting from long time when KOffice starting .docx format support. I will not move to OO.o to KOffice.

Thanks! KDE!

;)
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You Have Got To Be Kidding
by BCook2 on Monday 31/Mar/2008, @21:41
Is The Author Playing A Cruel April Fools Joke? I Think So....
PS: The Anonymous NA Donor Must Be M$
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Joke
by Ben on Monday 31/Mar/2008, @22:06
Oh my fucking god, that was the WORST prank ever! I started yelling "NO! NO!" when I saw the description, then went "What?" to the "anonymous 10k donation".

Wow. You really had me there.
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Why only $10,000?
by Stefan L on Monday 31/Mar/2008, @23:23
$10,000 is very cheap. I think KDE's support is more worth than this. Others got several 100 million Dollars to abandon the antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft in Europe. Why KDE took only $10,000?
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You got me really hard too!
by Andrey on Monday 31/Mar/2008, @23:26
I almost cry when I was reading this! I even thought to remove all KDE traces from my PC. Oh the Humanity!

You are so mean! ;D

PS: In my country April's Fools is in December 28th. I wasn't aware of the joke 'cause I didn't expect it at all! Gosh, you almost kill me!
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You can't trust anybody these days...
by BrokenSoul on Tuesday 01/Apr/2008, @00:22
At first it was hard to believe that the KDE ISO delegate dared to do that, but it's clear that he's been flirting with M$ since long time ago.

http://kiso.sourceforge.net/info_me.php

Sad. Very sad... :(
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Sold Out
by Bobby on Tuesday 01/Apr/2008, @00:34
For 10,000 dollars? Even prostitutes are asking for more :D :D
For April Fool's Day not bad but tomorrow it might be a reality, a nightmare that haunt us.
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You had me :-)
by Bart van Deenen on Tuesday 01/Apr/2008, @01:13
Man, I really was worried for a moment!
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aprils...
by Adb on Tuesday 01/Apr/2008, @01:49
...fools.

sucked.
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Oh god!
by Bardok on Tuesday 01/Apr/2008, @01:56
Come on! In Spain today isn't fools' day... I coudn't believe whay I was reading... I could only think: "oh god! that donation is a bribe! Don't you realise?". But thanks god I realised today is Aprils Fool...
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Blow to GNOME foundation
by anon on Tuesday 01/Apr/2008, @02:16
This is a very funny april fool's joke here, but it's also a blow to the GNOME foundation who actually supported OOXML standardization not long ago!
http://www.linux.com/feature/121930
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in another news, Open XML is an ISO standard
by mimoune djouallah on Tuesday 01/Apr/2008, @02:25
at first glimpse, i thought that kde is becoming more pragmatic and accepted the obvious, whether we like it or not, open xml is here to stay, no need to say that Microsoft has a near monopoly in office marketplace. i am just wondering how much time will take before we have a working support for open xml in koffice.

friendly
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Thank god it's April 1st
by BrettlMaster on Tuesday 01/Apr/2008, @02:25
And thanks for KDE not going the 'Icaza' way with regard to OOXML
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Wait... what?
by Leiteiro on Tuesday 01/Apr/2008, @02:57
This is unexpected, specially after his opinion some time ago http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2007/09/why-ooxml-as-standard-is-big-deal.html

What changed?
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Made my day
by fhd on Tuesday 01/Apr/2008, @05:14
Darn it, this made me realise how open I am to influence.

Reading the first lines, I was like: WTF. When reading on, I began to think: "maybe OOXML is not all that bad if dot people say so". The anonymous donation made me realize it's April 1st.

And the really puzzling thing is, that the only reason why I visited the dot right now was to see wether there's an April's fool on :)
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It's a sad day
by Darkelve on Tuesday 01/Apr/2008, @05:40
As an independent open standards developer, I find it sad that the focus is totally on OpenDocument and OOOXML.

My own superior standard (it counts 600.000+ pages and was written in a mix of a dozen dying languages, including that one in Mexico) which I submitted to ISO last year was never mentioned, despite obviously being of better quantity and quality.

And to think that I even bribed the stepdaughter of the hairdresser of the cousin of the baker of ISO's chairman.

The world ain't fair.
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ISO = crap?
by uh-oh on Tuesday 01/Apr/2008, @06:14
I certainly appreciate the humor, however given the way things have been going over the last few month, it is really hard to tell whether all of today's news are due to the date on the calendar, or some of them are actually real.

Like all those references to the approval that is supposed to be announced today or tomorrow. One would hope it's all just a sick joke, but knowing how things work in the business-as-usual world, it could all be for real.
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Damn you guys, almost killed me :)
by Rafael Fernández López on Tuesday 01/Apr/2008, @06:19
LOL, nice. On our culture fools day is not 31 of March. Was funny though. :)
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Nice one!
by Anony Moose on Tuesday 01/Apr/2008, @06:39
Had me for 10 seconds wondering "what the hell" :-) I liked it :-)
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:-)
by sim0n on Tuesday 01/Apr/2008, @07:37
Nice one haha :-D
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oh noes. gnome here i come
by freedomfighter on Tuesday 01/Apr/2008, @07:42
That does it. I'm switching to GNOME now. I hope you guys are happy. Corruption ftw, eh?
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April Fool's Day ...
by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday 01/Apr/2008, @08:06
...Is highly overrated :)
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Aaron, I'm Very Disappointed...
by Odysseus on Tuesday 01/Apr/2008, @08:39
...that we would sell out so cheaply, c'mon, it should be at least $12,000!

When you collect, just make sure they don't try palm off some worthless 3rd world currency on you like Zimbabwe dollars or Canadian dollars, and count your fingers afterwards. Say high to Bill and Steve for me.

John.

P.S. Can you put my cut in my Swiss account, you have the number from last time...
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hoho!
by max stirner on Tuesday 01/Apr/2008, @08:54
Funny!!

Considering the dire quality of the standard, the pattern of national body votes could actually be considered a "corruptibility to US corporate influence" index and should probably be published as such!

APPROVAL - our Lords are in Redmond, consider us the 51st US state!

ABSTAIN - we're honest enough to -almost- say its a pile of shit, but we've read about Hiroshima in the school textbooks

DISAPPROVE - not part of the neoliberal economic order, some degree of sovereignty. At least as far as technical standards go..
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The sad part is...
by Max on Tuesday 01/Apr/2008, @09:00
... that I hear it's true. OOXML seems to be on it's way to be accepted. :(


btw. that April fools was better than google's. So you did good Jonathan :)
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You got me too :)
by polrus on Tuesday 01/Apr/2008, @09:03
that was a good one :) it take me a good while
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Got me
by Ben on Tuesday 01/Apr/2008, @09:11
I knew you were joking as soon as you mentioned $10,000 but I thought it was a clever satire on the OOXML process rather than an April's fools day
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April 1 = April's Fool
by RV on Tuesday 01/Apr/2008, @09:19
Don't you guys realize that today in the US is April Fools? The hint was in the comment ""and following a $10,000 donation from an anonymous North American source...", implying that MS made the contribution.

HAPPY APRIL FOOLS
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Finally seeing the light
by Ronald Daniels on Tuesday 01/Apr/2008, @09:45
I'm hoping that KDE now starts to adopt WinForms, Win32, and other Microsoft technologies, since then KDE would kick ass.
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woops...
by Stalwart on Tuesday 01/Apr/2008, @12:52
The only problem with this article is - it's not an april fool anymore. OOXML is ISO standart as of today =(
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Sad
by Kapri on Tuesday 01/Apr/2008, @18:19
The problem with these jokes is that they're funny because they are far from being real.

"Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth said the approval of Microsoft's Open Office XML is a sad day for ISO and the computing public."

http://blogs.zdnet.com/open-source/?p=2222

Once you think about it, is actually really sad.
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Sad
by Kapri on Tuesday 01/Apr/2008, @18:19
The problem with these jokes is that they're funny because they are far from being real.

"Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth said the approval of Microsoft's Open Office XML is a sad day for ISO and the computing public."

http://blogs.zdnet.com/open-source/?p=2222

Once you think about it, is actually really sad.
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Now that April Fools is over, can we delete that?
by Randalf on Tuesday 01/Apr/2008, @19:37
As said
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Joke or not M$ has won
by Giovanni Venturi on Wednesday 02/Apr/2008, @03:53
Joke or not joke now this happened:

http://www.iso.org/iso/pressrelease.htm?refid=Ref1123

What a shame :(
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Brilliant
by TheGreatGonzo on Wednesday 02/Apr/2008, @06:05
This almost got me as I was reading it a day late!! That was until the $10,000 donation.....

Happy April Fools one and all!!
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:( Wish it were a joke :(
by Max on Wednesday 02/Apr/2008, @19:21
http://www.betanews.com/article/Now_an_official_ISO_standard_Microsofts_OOXML_invites_controversy/1207176258
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haha
by she on Thursday 03/Apr/2008, @08:36
haha
the date almost fooled me

But then I read 10.000 donation and it was immediately obvious that IF any bribery is going on, THESE indicators would NOT be disclosed ;)
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O.o
by 1Debianita on Thursday 03/Apr/2008, @10:09
OMFG it´s true, OOXLM is a standar by now, and the donation, and A. Seigo is now ranked Supreme Kommander. thats Fucking surpricing
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Dont do that again!
by José Mendes on Thursday 03/Apr/2008, @10:29
You almost killed me... If you imagine the names i called you... until i didnt realized that was a joke...
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