Lately I happened to read something that made me think, basically Miguel de Icaza stance on microsoft’s pseudo xml format and microsoft’s flash workalike.
He tried to remove some polarization we have on anything made by Microsoft and tried to compare in a less biased way the 2 spec AND flagship programs, most of the people could stop at the first part and get the message “ms stuff isn’t that bad afterall” or even the “ms stuff has nice ideas here and there”. I read it as in “there is MUCH work to do and ignoring them isn’t productive”, I’d add my point of view as in, instead of following them and doing their same errors or supporting their same horrors, we could just learn and try to do something different (and broken in different ways) starting for our own foundations and nothing that could be undermined by them?
Having a microsoft offerings workalike may be good for some, but since there are way better tecnologies out there waiting to be improved it’s just a waste. (e.g. Vorbis, wavpack, mkv, nut, XUL, D, parrot, Dirac, snow, SVG…)
Anyway the nice thing of opensource is that everybody is free to do whatever he wants and usually sharing good ideas works in the end, if more people make usable/better tools more people will use them.