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OOXML Will Pass Amid Massive Irregularities
Posted by
kdawson
on Sun Mar 30, 2008 08:53 PM
from the all-over-but-the-shouting-and-the-antitrust-probes dept.
from the all-over-but-the-shouting-and-the-antitrust-probes dept.
Tokimasa notes a CNet blog predicting that OOXML will make the cut. Updegrove agrees, as does the OpenMalasia blog. Reports of irregularities continue to surface, such as this one from Norway — "The meeting: 27 people in the room, 4 of which were administrative staff from Standard Norge. The outcome: Of the 24 members attending, 19 disapproved, 5 approved. The result: The administrative staff decided that Norway wants to approve OOXML as an ISO standard." Groklaw adds reportage of odd processes in Germany and Croatia.
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Norway's Yes-To-OOXML Is Formally Protested 324 comments
An anonymous reader writes "Norway's yes-to-OOXML may tip the vote in favor of accepting it as an ISO-standard, but the committee chairman just faxed a formal protest to the ISO. 'I am writing to you in my capacity as Chairman (of 13 years standing) of the Norwegian mirror committee to ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 34. I wish to inform you of serious irregularities in connection with the Norwegian vote on ISO/IEC DIS 29500 (Office Open XML) and to lodge a formal protest. You will have been notified that Norway voted to approve OOXML in this ballot. This decision does not reflect the view of the vast majority of the Norwegian committee, 80% of which was against changing Norway's vote from No with comments to Yes.'"
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Gross sounding title (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Gross sounding title (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Gross sounding title (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Gross sounding title (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Gross sounding title (Score:5, Insightful)
You have forgotten all of the benefits the the ISO process.
Lets see. There is making a mockery of the standards making process. There is a cheapening of the term ISO standard. When I see that in the future, it won't have as much meaning to me. It does not mean something will work, or is used by the industry, or even that it is possible to implement. I know it is not multi-vendor. It will not prevent lock-in. Any data comitted to it may or may not be portable.
Also, as serves them right. The ISO has been crippled by this. All of those members that came on board to help Microsoft. Well, they are not showing up at any of the other meetings. So when a standards body meets. Has 40 members only 10 of them show up, and you get 4 YES, 4 NO, 2 abstain and 30 not present. Well shucks. Things just about grind to a halt.
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This is getting ridiculous (Score:5, Insightful)
No day goes by without hearing from some croporate giant running roughshod over the laws, procedures or institutions of democratic countries.
The United States have let a handful of mega-croporations totally wreck it's economy with the blessing of the government that was elected while pulling the wool over the electorate's eyes.
It is time for the people to revolt, and put the croporations back to where they belong by firmly asserting the power of the government over croporations, if need by, by the croporate death penalty and the confiscation of the croporation's assets.
The government has thoroughly been subverted by croporate cronies; those should be charged with subversive sedition and thrown in jail and the key tossed in the Marianas trench.
Re:This is getting ridiculous (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:This is getting ridiculous (Score:5, Interesting)
You know that is the truth since they have to push it through by force, instead of accepting the fact that there already exist a standard, that they refuse to support.
As far as I am concerned, all they have accomplished is to shame them self. The fact that they get an ISO-stamp, does not mean that OOXML is an open standard, and it is my belief that it never will be.
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Re:This is getting ridiculous (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm from Finland and really ashamed on how all went. In Finland, most of the people in the meeting opposed (many corporations, two of the ministries, etc.) so the chairman (who was a replaced one, the previous one opposed OOXML so he had to leave) decided they didn't vote but made decision based on general consensus even though "complete unanimity wasn't achieved". I mean... What?! There was one of the changed votes (5 votes need to be changed from previous try that OOXML would pass and this was one of them).
While it would be easy to blame it all on the evil USA and their nasty corporations... Ofcourse the corporations roam free if they are allowed to but why in hell are they? Finland (among other countries) needs to look into itself too and ponder "What the hell just happened and WHY?".
Captcha is very appropriate... Dishonor
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Re:This is getting ridiculous (Score:5, Insightful)
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Well that is because laws are inherently meant to: (Score:5, Interesting)
It sounds far better in its native tongue than it does translated to english, but pay heed that this holds true regardless of the country.
Likewise, for running roughshod over laws, most laws aren't written to help "the people" and never were. Recall the "regulative restrictions" placed upon CB (citizen's band) radios in the USA, requiring that individuals pay a 10 dollar license fee and getting "registered".
It was a shitty law meant to squeeze blood from the proverbial turnip. People did not comply, at all. When the regulation was reduced to mere "sign a form so we know you have one" (aka registration) people still refused. As a result, the whole thing was dropped formally due to "mass non compliance".
Irony? People still want to have legislators set the rules, when the simple rule is, as always has been, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you, but do it first and do it well." The legislators know this, which is why, regardless of the country or the century or the millenium, all governing bodies fuck the people good and hard, and then pretend it is someone else's fault.
"It is the free market's fault. It is the free individual's fault. It is society's fault."
If people disapprove of Microsoft's standards, then they should NOT USE THEM! PERIOD!! There are plenty of competing standards, and plenty of clean open source software out there. Use it, or lose it. Just like freedom. It isn't granted by others. It is freely available to those who would make use of it and be cognizant of its presence and benefits. Period. Everything else on this subject is bullshit excuse making from impotent and incompetent wimps unable to stop from penis envy with Bill Gates. Instead of trying to "beat" the big boys, start actually side stepping them. Like the airlines and the big telecoms, they are ALL obsolete. So is central government and big agencies and militaries. The world's people will never see this, regardless of how blatantly visible it is to some of us. Stop asking for others to prohibit all options you can have, and exercise the power of your choice and your wallet. You don't like Gates or Microsoft? Don't buy their shit. Don't like starbucks? Don't buy their cappucinos (in fact I make a far nicer one at home, and I get to put rum in mine too!!) Get used to it. If you don't approve of a company, STOP GIVING THEM PRESS... stop buying their products, and instead promote those that espouse the beliefs and values you support. I use Linux and BSD and rarely if ever drop back to windows to play a game WINEX doesn't support yet. That's it. My choices? Yes. Took me four years to find and purchase the right wireless cards I wanted. Did I switch back to windows because WPA supplicant didn't work right when they first started? No, I merely did without wireless and went so far as to patch mine in a crude and unapproved fashion. The fixes are in and it works okay now. I made choices. So should you. Stop being angry. It helps nothing and wastes your energy pointlessly.
Hope my advice helps. I spent a lot of time being angry and political campaigning, here and IRL. None of it helped. Letting go, and voting with my walleet and my feet helped more. Try it.
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Re:This is getting ridiculous (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:This is getting ridiculous (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:This is getting ridiculous (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:This is getting ridiculous (Score:5, Insightful)
See, you've missed half the trick right there. It's not a matter of bribing "so many board members", it's just a matter of getting the committee chairs on your side and having them get creative with the voting or vote recording process. You don't have to bribe all the members (or even most of them) if the chairperson can tell them "'no' votes aren't allowed" for obscure procedural reasons (Germany), or if they ignore an overwhelming 'no' vote (Norway), or if they can say that voting will be extended to allow email votes by those that didn't show up at the meeting -- and any that don't send email will be taken as a 'yes' vote (Poland).
As for swinging committee chairs to your side, here's [slashdot.org] a pretty good explanation of that process.
Then of course there's just stacking the working groups by having all your Microsoft-Partner business buddies decide to join up and take part.
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Re:This is getting ridiculous (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:This is getting ridiculous (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:This is getting ridiculous (Score:5, Interesting)
However: as a member until a few weeks ago of the British Standards Institute panel on this topic (I resigned because it's simply impossible to review a 6,000 page document properly and keep a full-time job, the work is unpaid), all that I can do, amid the noise and shouting, is to say that in my opinion a) all the comments about what a pile of crap the draft is are entirely correct and b) I am totally mystified by why national bodies are changing their minds.
I attended the Ballot Resolution Meeting in Geneva, though as a non-delegate was not allowed into the deliberations. Discussions with numerous delegates confirmed my view that the draft remains unfit.
If I had still been a panel member last week my vote would have been no.
It appears that that would have then been 5 for 2 against inside the BSI if the leaks and rumours are to be believed. The BSI procedures are in fact that there is no voting but instead 'consensus' is sought. If that's true, the 5/1 split reported doesn't sound like consensus to me but I wasn't present and can't verify the leaks because the BSI process is closed to outsiders.
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Re:This is getting ridiculous (Score:5, Informative)
BSI British Standards
389 Chiswick High Road
London
W4 4AL
Telephone: +44 (0)20 8996 9001
Fax: +44 (0)20 8996 7001
Email: cservices@bsigroup.com
But they appear to have battened down the hatches and my guess is that the most likely outcome that you will be ignored.
From what I have seen they are all decent people but institutionally incapable of realising that they have made a big mistake. This whole controversy seems to be something that their systems are incapable of recognising, let alone dealing with.
It looks like a kind of collective denial, but I don't know them well enough to judge better; what I describe as collective denial might conceivably be a well-rehearsed response to dealing with situations like this.
Frankly I'm disgusted with the way that this has been handled. Their systems and processes are, in my view, arcane, out-of-date and unfit. Higher up they seem to be doing a rabbit-in-the-headlights response of just hoping it doesn't matter and it will all go away.
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Re:This is getting ridiculous (Score:5, Insightful)
Add that to the fact that the vast majority of people haven't heard of, or simply don't give a rats ass about, the ISO process. Tada, they can pull these kinds of shenanigans without much risk of a public opinion backlash.
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Re:This is getting ridiculous (Score:5, Insightful)
Obviously, you didn't RTFA. The German, Norwegian and Croatian members whose votes were essentially negated have all blown the whistle and it's having just as much effect as the detailed account of Dubya's lies about Iraq has had on continuing the war he started. I think people in many countries, starting here in the good old USA, should start reading some history; e.g., "When in the course of human events...."
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Re:This is getting ridiculous (Score:5, Insightful)
That's more what it seems like to me, despite my personal objections and issues with OOXML.
I think that, because this is a key issue for MS, they exploited the system in every way they could, you don't even need corruption in most places, if the have the right vulnerabilities.
The reason why we are all saying that it can't be possible that they accept it is that some of us read the standard, of excerpts from it. The complaint is that, even to lay people, it is very easy to see it's not a standard at all, and tries to standardize an area that already has a real standard approved (ODF), without improving on it. It should be easier to spot for standards specialists. There are issues where you can have different opinions, but this seems too clear cut to even be discussed.
A standard should be something that allows you to test compliance. OOXML, in lots of points does not help you build a compliance test. Of course, those tags that say your should render content as Word9x come to mind. That is why it's so clear to me that I can't be approved, in its current form. Of course, it could be improved and become a standard, but it has not happened yet.
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Re:This is getting ridiculous (Score:5, Insightful)
and it still passes, there's something wrong in
Norway.
The simplest answer is usually the best answer.
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Re:This is getting ridiculous (Score:5, Insightful)
Not at all. It's precisely because of the leaks and whistleblowers that we're aware of the corruption and interference that has taken place. And your "/all/ corrupt" is a strawman -- it doesn't require everyone in the standards body to be corrupted, just a few key individuals with influence over the voting process.
(Now, please put down the Microsoft talking points and step away from the keyboard.)
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Re:This is getting ridiculous (Score:5, Informative)
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No cover up. Corruption is blatant. Who cares? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, there was corruption. Tons of it. It has all been very well documented. Read groklaw.net or noooxml.org.
What does msft care is the slashdot/groklaw crowd doesn't like it?
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Re:So they aren't corrupt, but... (Score:4, Informative)
Hanlon's razor says stupidity, not ignorance. Ignorance can be cured with information.
There's a corollary to Hanlon's razor that applies here, though:
Never attribute to stupidity that which can be adequately explained by greed.
Regards,
--
*Art
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Ignorance my azz (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9033701 [computerworld.com]
Now tell me that's not corruption.
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Can ISO de-recognise standards? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Can ISO de-recognise standards? (Score:5, Informative)
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Standards process failure? (Score:5, Interesting)
The ISO has just lost their credability (Score:5, Interesting)
No one looking to establish a new, credible, standard in an field relating to software or information exchange will ever use them as a prime standards body again. They are now a marketing term and not a professional resource.
I agree. The ISO is now the M$O. (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:The ISO has just lost their credability (Score:4, Insightful)
The fact that this is the first time such thing happens is just because people in this standard are way more vocal and know how to use the current media (internet.)
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Microsoft has made enemies this week (Score:5, Interesting)
want to read the standard writeups? - ODF & OO (Score:5, Interesting)
http://docs.oasis-open.org/office/v1.1/OS/OpenDocument-v1.1.pdf [oasis-open.org]
OOXML:
http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/files/ECMA-ST/Office%20Open%20XML%20Part%201%20(PDF).zip [ecma-international.org]
http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/files/ECMA-ST/Office%20Open%20XML%20Part%202%20(PDF).zip [ecma-international.org]
http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/files/ECMA-ST/Office%20Open%20XML%20Part%203%20(PDF).zip [ecma-international.org]
http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/files/ECMA-ST/Office%20Open%20XML%20Part%204%20(PDF).zip [ecma-international.org]
http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/files/ECMA-ST/Office%20Open%20XML%20Part%205%20(PDF).zip [ecma-international.org]
There's a word for this. (Score:4, Funny)
There's a word to describe the activity of making that kind of change. Microsoft uses this word to describe itself all the time.
The word is: innovation.
Microsoft Approves Itself (Score:5, Informative)
Microsoft is approving its own "standard", I'd say. We count 20 direct Microsoft participants:
1 BELGIUM Mr. Bruno SCHRODER MICROSOFT
2 BRAZIL Mr. Fernando GEBARA Microsoft Brazil
3 CANADA Mr. Paul COTTON Microsoft Canada
4 COTE D'IVOIRE * Mr. Wemba OPOTA MICROSOFT West and central Africa
5 CZECH REPUBLIC Mr. tepán BECHYNSKÝ Microsoft Czech Republic, Ltd
6 DENMARK Mr. Jasper Hedegaard BOJSEN Microsoft Denmark
7 FINLAND Mr. Kimmo BERGIUS Microsoft Ltd
8 GERMANY Mr. Mario WENDT Microsoft Deutschland GmbH
9 ISRAEL Mr. Shmuel YAIR Microsoft
10 ITALY Ing. Andrea VALBONI Microsoft Italy
11 JAPAN Mr. Naoki ISHIZAKA Microsoft
12 KENYA Mr. Emmanuel BIRECH Microsoft East Africa
13 NEW ZEALAND Mr. Brett ROBERTS Microsoft New Zealand
14 NORWAY Mr. Shahzad Rana Microsoft Norge AS
15 PORTUGAL * Prof. Miguel Sales DIAS MICROSOFT Portugal
16 SWITZERLAND Mr. Marc HOLITSCHER Microsoft Schweiz GmbH
17 UNITED STATES Mr. Doug MAHUGH Microsoft Corporation
18 Ecma International Mr. Brian JONES Microsoft
19 Ecma International * Mr. Jean PAOLI Microsoft Corporation
20 Assistant to Project Editor Mr. Tristan DAVIS Microsoft
Nope, there's no conflict of interest or ethics issues here. I don't know how anybody could think that Microsoft is influencing the ISO standards process.
Easy Fix (Score:5, Funny)
That's the MS standard out the window as it thinks 1900 was a leap year.
Re:I Don't Get It? (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.noooxml.org/open:rejectooxmlnow/ [noooxml.org]
^ Some reasons
I myself am no critical analyzer of standards, but the fact that the standard will still have a microsoft copyright on it is enough for me to say no. If, let's say, it was adobe instead of microsoft (and isn't pdf, for there are opensource implementations of pdf), I would still have the same viewpoint.
Standards shouldn't have disclosed code in, which is why I believe if something like a document format is standardized, the source code should be open to all.
If I am wrong about OOXML in that way, someone correct me.
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Reasons to hate OOXML (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:I Don't Get It? (Score:5, Informative)
20 good reasons to disapprove OOXML
... Microsoft therefore had to rush this standard through. Its a simple matter of commercial interests!" A disapproval would motivate the submitter to contribute to the existing ISO Office format, ODF (ISO 26300). We find historical precedence for a proposed Microsoft standard being disapproved in order to constructively motivate harmonization of standards: the Microsoft VML and W3C SVG standards. Microsoft's VML was rejected at the W3C in favour in Adobe's SVG. Microsoft's response was to join the W3C working group to improve SVG which later became a W3C standard. To the extent that SVG is incorporated into ISO/IEC:26300 SVG is an official ISO/IEC/ITTF international standard.
1. ISO's "Fast Track" process was abused for standard development 'on the fly'. In the past ECMA has "fast tracked" small (50-500 page), mature and industry accepted standards. OOXML is large (6000+ pages) and immature. An editorial of Redmond Developer News described: "By contrast [to ISO 26300], the Microsoft OOXML specification takes what might be called a kitchen sink approach." -- an ISO process is not thought to become a kitchen sink for half-baked ECMA standards. OOXML was only released in 2006 and is hardly accepted by the industry. The OOXML community around the format is a community of one. All third party supporters have contractual relations with the vendor. The limitations of the "Fast Track" process; fast evaluation time frames, extremely limited time to resolve all the concerns and little room for modification has demonstrated that the "Fast Track" process was unsuitable for OOXML. It gives us little surprise as the process was never intended for standard development.
2. OOXML is a proposed parallel standard without a justification. No empirical evidence was provided for the assertion that OOXML faithfully represents the corpus of existing documents of a specific vendor as opposed to the existing ISO standard or customized versions thereof. ECMA's branding of the format as a silver bullet for archiving cannot be tested by NBs. Additionally ECMA failed to provide a mapping between the legacy binary formats and OOXML. The binary legacy specifications was only made public in 2008. Multiple standards for the very same purpose with conversion issues undermine the respect for ISO standardization. You need a consistent justification to adopt another ISO standard for the same field which is not build upon an existing ISO standard - not to mention backwards compatibility to ISO 26300 architecture.
3. OOXML's ISO agenda is to undermine the adoption of the existing ISO Office standard. OOXML evangelist Mahugh explained: "When ODF was made an ISO standard, Microsoft had to react quickly as certain governments have procurement policies which prefer ISO standards.
4. OOXML is incompatible with ISO/IEC and WTO Technical Barrier to Trade (TBT) basic principles, which ISO/IEC are supposed to respect. The BRM added the notion of "Microsoft Office 97 to Microsoft Office 2008 inclusive" to which products' formats a 'faithful representation' is sought by the proposed ISO standard. International standards are not permitted to discriminate specific vendors positively, and thus all competitors negatively. The standard would become a technical market barrier, a tool of unfair competition. Formally a standard is supposed to avoid referencing products. Non-compliance with WTO requirements on technical barriers to trade due to formalities will be an obstacle for the adoption of OOXML in the public sector and undermine trust in the ISO label.
5. The BRM heavily amended those ECMA 'dispositions of comments' it had time to discuss. The BRM only discussed about 10% of the known technical issues. Of 54 non-editorial issues covered in detail, 48 were modified at the BRM. This left 850 issues without check-over, and pushed through by a bulk vote. These
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Re:I Don't Get It? (Score:5, Insightful)
The entire purpose of OOXML is to subvert the increasing call for public documents to be stored in a format that can A) be read without buying Word/Office/..., on the theory that documents created in a citizen's government should be available to those citizens without paying a corporate "tax", and B) that by documenting the format of the documents, readers/editors can be created, as needed, at a future time when the original creation tool may no longer exist or have a computer on which to run, unlike, say, Word documents, where support for older formats is simply dropped by Microsoft.
Microsoft is an ongoing criminal organization, and as such, should be seized under the RICO act, and its parts sold off or its source code simply published for those parts without buyers, and the buyers should be forever blocked from forming a cartel, single company, sharing directors,
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You forgot to mention (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:I Don't Get It? (Score:5, Informative)
1. It's a 6000-page spec (plus another 1500 or so pages in response to negative comments from the September ballot). For a facetious answer as to why
2. It violates ISO guidelines in that rather than referring to existing standards wherever possible, it invents new (and broken) ones. E.g. MS vs ISO country codes, MS vs ISO date handling (including broken leap years), MS vs ISO color codes, MS vs ISO's math markup, etc, etc.
3. It's under-specified, e.g. tags like 'lineSpaceLikeWord95'.
4. Even assuming it were specified well enough to implement, such implementations would be at risk of Microsoft patents, notwithstanding Micosoft's so-called patent pledge (which amounts to promising not to sue hobbyist programmers who develop 100%-compliant code in their basements, but doesn't extend that promise to anyone else or to anyone sharing or actually using the code).
5. For more, see the thousand or so comments brought to the BRM and not individually addressed, or the hundreds of additional problems found with the spec since the BRM.
While some people probably wouldn't touch MS-OOXML even if it were perfect (and it's a long way from that) simply because it came from Microsoft, the vast majority of its nay-sayers are complaining about it's piss-poor technical quality, and would be doing so no matter who originally authored such a crappy spec.
Anyone who has ever had to try to develop software from a self-contradictory, ambiguous and incomplete specification -- which probably includes a fair percentage of slashdotters -- rightly runs screaming at the thought of this turd achieving ISO blessing. (Ditto for anyone who has ever had to try to use such software in conjunction with some other software a different team developed to the "same" spec.)
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Re:I Don't Get It? (Score:4, Insightful)
ISO standards are supposed to be clearly and completely defined. These standards definitions are created so that multiple parties can participate in government and other public activities through information interchange.
OOXML fails in very serious ways to fit that description. Not only are various aspects of the 'standard' vague, but they reference descriptions of behaviors of a particular software application on a particular platform without defining what that means. Without any issues of politics and anything 'human,' by ISO's definition and rules of adoption or creation, OOXML is technically not eligible to be an ISO standard.
Beyond this is the use of the "fast track" approval process. This process is supposed to exist to enlist standard formats that are in wide and common use. Formats like PDF and PNG, if they are not already ISO standards, might be good candidates for such since they are already in very heavy use and are very clearly defined and implemented widely. The OOXML format, as defined, is not a "ubiquitous" format. It's not even implemented completely or correctly by the company that has defined it. And because it is not clearly defined, cannot be correctly implemented by other parties. All of this means it is ineligible for the fast track approval process.
Finally, after it initially failed the fast track process in spite of wild irregularities in the process, this second attempt has resulted in passage but does so with further irregularities. Each participating country in the process operates through its own set of rules. In various examples, these rules were either changed, convoluted, or simply ignored. In some instances, the results seem to indicate simple and direct fraud.
All of this represents corruption and possibly the destruction of the purpose of ISO approval.
If ISO were a pure religion, what Microsoft has caused to happen would be called blasphemy. If ISO were a court, what Microsoft has caused to happen would be called a travesty. And if ISO were a business, what Microsoft has caused to happen, it would be fraud.
Acceptance as an ISO standard means that a file format is eligible for use in various official and public purposes. The purpose of requiring an ISO standard for such formatting is to allow any and all parties interested in participating the opportunity to do so by following a clearly defined and published standard. In the case of OOXML, this would be impossible for any party other than Microsoft to do this effectively since the definition is incomplete and defined by the behavior of its applications which are subject to revision. In the event that a government process or activity requires the use of this "ISO" standard, it effectively excludes all other vendors but Microsoft from participating.
I'm not sure how much more clearly the problem with OOXML's adoption as an ISO standard can be defined. It's not a question of "hating" OOXML. It's a matter of subverting a definition and process that has been depended upon internationally to clearly and precisely define standards of process and information interchange.
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Re:I Don't Get It? (Score:5, Insightful)
Read it and get back to us if you still have questions.
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Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Insightful)
The corporations will win every time. As smart as academics are, they just aren't prepared for this kind of thing.
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Re:Hollow victory (Score:5, Informative)
Basically, this makes Office qualify for that, but still have what amounts to a closed spec. They don't really care about all the rest of it.
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Duplicative standards conflict with WTO rules (Score:5, Informative)
"the president of the European Academy for Standardisation, Tineke Egyedi, is critical of OOXML being made a standard when ODF exists already, and she believes duplicative standards conflict with WTO rules"
Not that stuff like rules or laws ever stopped msft.
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