I mentioned in my write-up of the Microsoft visit to SLUG that Microsoft are going to release the specifications to their binary file formats. I wasn’t aware at the time that this had already been announced: the specs will be released on February 15. Groklaw has decided to look a little closer at the pledge.
Is this a win for information and software freedom worldwide, or just the next step towards a new stage of vendor lock-in? It remains to be seen, but it does show that our keeping Microsoft’s nose to the grindstone is generating some effect. Don’t stop now, we’ve only just begun! 🙂
A note about the video: it will be released as soon as we are able. We’re at linux.conf.au at the moment, so it’ll more likely be out next week. I’ve currently got 20GB of glorious HD video sitting on my hard drive, which we need to edit and convert to something more Internet-friendly. The transcoding alone will take a while!
