“Captain Charles Boycott was an unfortunate chap. Not only was
he the object of prolonged social ostracism, but his name has
passed into history as both a noun and a verb describing that
action. At the moment, the idea is much on people’s minds because
of suggestions that the Beijing Olympic games should be boycotted,
but here I want to discuss something quite different: whether the
open source community should be boycotting Microsoft, and if that
is even possible.“In part, the trigger for this is Microsoft’s recent behaviour
during the approval process for its OOXML document format. As I’ve
written elsewhere on Linux Journal, it seems to me that on this
occasion Microsoft has crossed the line of acceptability: not only
has it stooped to just about every trick in the book to win
‘approval,’ it has broken the entire ISO organisation in the
process, with huge, long-term collateral damage…”