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Here, we learn that Rob Weir understands that ad hominem attacks are usually a fallacy, a way of changing the subject rather than addressing the merits of what was said. We may therefore deduce that when Rob Weir employs the ad hominem attack himself, he does so knowing that he is arguing a fallacy.

Here on a single page, we see several Rob Weir ad hominem attacks, including his ad hominem circumstantial innuendo suggesting that Alex Bown's motive in writing a bug report is to defend Microsoft's implementation of ODF. There is also a notable accusation that Brown is intentionally misleading his readers, which attacks Brown's honesty.

The ad hominem fallacy is a tactic frequently employed by IBM and its followers, most notably by Rob Weir, against those who disagree with IBM's positions and goals. Those who advocate for repairing the badly broken ODF standard or prepare bug reports on that standard are among the most frequently targeted victims of IBM's ad hominem fallacy attacks.

As will be seen in other bookmarks, many IBM staffers' arguments relevant to office document format specifications have been based on variations of the ad hominem fallacy, more commonly known as the "personal attack." .

Rob Weir racks up another ad hominem attack, this time against Rick Jelliffe.

IBM's Rob Weir does it again. What's to be done when your company is caught patenting methods implemented in an open standard for years? Change the subject in an attempt to kill the messenger who bears the news. Score another vitriolic ad hominem attack for Rob Weir. 

Here, IBM's Rob Weir takes OOXML to task for not specifying scripts and macros. But nary a mention of the fact that OpenDocument suffers from the same weakness. Yet another IBM double standard. He also tacks on an ad hominem attack against Gary Edwards, in lieu of addressing the merits of what Edwards said.

Here we learn two things about IBM's Rob Weir. First, score another ad hominem attack for him because of his innuendo suggesting that Rick Jelliffe and Alex Brown are liars. Second, we learn that Mr. Weir expects a retraction to be made when inaccurate statements are brought to a blog author's attention. Having been recently outed for rewriting history to call Alex Brown and Wikipedia names and having confessed to silently editing his blog in relevant regard, will Mr. Weir correct his own blog article? See http://www.adjb.net/post/No-one-supports-ISO-ODF-today.aspx and Weir's confession in the comments on that page. Or are retractions yet another case of an IBM double standard?

In 2007, IBM's Rob Weir roundly criticized OOXML because the principle justification for having a largely duplicative international standard was compatibility with the billions of extant legacy Microsoft Office documents in binary formats, yet the specifications for the binary formats were not included in the OOXML specification. Just how committed IBM management was to that position may be seen in the fact that IBM later instigated an antitrust investigation of Microsoft Office by the E.U.'s DG Competition through the European Committee on Interoperable Systems, alleging monopoly abuse by Microsoft on the same grounds, an investigation still ongoing. \n\nIn this blog post comment, IBM's Rob Weir takes a hard line position that the sufficiency of the OOXML standard's specificity must be determined on the basis of what is stated in the standard itself, as opposed to Microsoft's subsequent recoding of Office to remove compatibility defects between Microsoft's implementation of OOXML and the binary formats.\n\nThe quoted passage may be usefully compared to later IBM arguments and actions in regard to the OpenDocument.standard that will be included in later bookmarks. For example, Weir has been unyielding that vendor-defined extensions to the ODF standard must be classified as conformant in ODF 1.2, yet their specifications are definitionally not part of the ODF specification. As another example, in 2009 Weir attacked Microsoft for having implemented ODF 1.1 using formula markup different from that used by OOo, despite ODF 1.1's lack of specifications for spreadsheet formulas. Weir's rationale: that vendors must collaborate to code around holes in the standard. He came very close to arguing that data gaps in a standard are irrelevant. See e.g., http://www.robweir.com/blog/2009/05/battle-for-odf-interoperability.html \n\nHypothesis: IBM's treats ODF as a double standard rather than a standard. What IBM argues in effect is that what is required for OOXML does not apply

As will be seen in other bookmarks, one of IBM staffers' frequently employed tactics is the circumstantial ad hominem fallacy. Often, the IBM fallacious argument takes the form of suggestions or innuendos that a speaker is biased by their employer's identity or innuendos suggesting that someone is acting in an IBM competitor's interests.