This past Thursday was Thanksgiving in the US. Everyone's got something to be thankful for it seems. Whether it's Jessica Alba, or dead turkey, that you're thankful for, isn't the subject of this post. It's about being thankful for open standards, specifications, and all that stuff that everyone in the open source community likes to have utopian dreams of. Wouldn't it be great if all the file formats were specified in open documentation? It would. We could all write parsers for them much more easily then. So why does everyone bitch and moan when someone from the community gets involved in the discussion of a standard for a collection of file formats for an office suite? Because it's from Microsoft. The anti-christ to everyone's Linus Torvalds. Well, for all those people who want to bemoan the world with their trifles about Microsoft trying to subvert the free world, here's a hint:

Shut the hell up!

If all you're going to do is bitch and moan about it, then you're not part of the solution. You're part of the problem. For open standards to truly be a viable option for people like Microsoft, they need to be shown the light. You can't have open standards, by only selectively allowing people to produce open standards. By doing so, we end up with the same crap we've had for the last 20 years. A big steaming pile of nothing. We can't just sit back and hope for them to suddenly get it, and write great open standards either. We have to get off our collective fat asses, and get involved in their process for making standards. We need to show them what we need. As for OOXML itself, it is irrelevant. Whether or not people from the community are involved in the process, it will become a standard. The only way to improve it, is to get involved. Wasn't that how Linux got better in the first place? We all picked it up, got involved, and started collectively making it better.

So go sit back, and think about where Linux would be, if none of us got involved. If you want to change the world, you've got to do more than just hope for it. You've got to get off your ass and change it. So kudos to those involved in the ECMA OOXML process. More of you should be involved.