Microsoft to support Chinese Open Source Project
May 21st, 2007 by philipp
Microsoft announced support for a Chinese Open Source project. The Beihang University at Beijing together with several other Chinese institutions is currently working on a translation of the Chinese Unified Office Format (UOF) into Microsoft’s debatable OOXML format, and vice versa. Open XML to UOF Translator, as the new application will be called, is going to be released at the end of January 2008. The aim behind Microsoft’s step seems to be clear: Supporting an open source project should probably be much cheaper than developing it yourself. Additionally there’’s a lot of money to be saved and a lot of publicity to be gained by using popular free software which practically advertises for itself.
It seems as if MS knows exactly which advantages free software has to offer. Quite funny, if you ask me. Didn’t Microsoft lately propagate the death of the free software movement?
Source: Heise.de
