A win for the People… or Pyrrhic victory?

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!