India Decides to Vote "No" For OOXML 120
Indian writes to mention that after an intense meeting at Delhi's Manak Bhawan the 21-member technical committee has decided to vote against Microsoft's Open Office Extensible Mark Up Language (OOXML) standard at the September meeting of the International Standards Organization (ISO). "Microsoft said it respects the government's decision. 'There were only three options "Yes", "No" and "Abstain" to be taken and we respect the government's decision,' Microsoft's legal affairs head Rakesh Bakshi said. He, however, added that India's 'No' vote will become a 'Yes' if Microsoft is able to resolve all technical issues with OOXML before the ballot resolution committee of ISO."
In related News: Germany will vote YES (Score:5, Informative)
minor gripe (Score:5, Informative)
Oh goodie, MS has to patch bugs on a deadline (Score:4, Informative)
Well, that won't be problem. Everyone knows that when the shit has hit the fan and the crunch is on, the MS coders get their act together and just stamp out all the errors and publish a completly fixed solution.
Any of you buying this? Anyone? I don't think even a slashdot editor would fall for that line.
MS has worked on OOXML for a long time, and it still is a mess. Remind you of anything? Like say, everything else ever released by MS?
Maybe MS hopes that the ISO vote will be postponed until MS can release OOXML SP1. After all, that has always worked before. People delayed buying OS/2 because MS promised to release a new windows that would fix everything. People waited with finding alternatives to every single windows release with promise of better things to come.
You will see if MS gets their way if news emerges of the vote being delayed. If that happens, then MS has it in the bag. Then it no longer matters if they ever fix it, if you delayed to wait for a product, you gotta buy that product or admit you were wrong in waiting.
Re:Oh goodie, MS has to patch bugs on a deadline (Score:5, Informative)
Details on Indian campaign (Score:5, Informative)
ODFAlliance India Mirror [odfalliance.in] on Wordprocessing-ML subcommittee discussions
Issue List [odfalliance.in] submitted to the Technical Committee by the WordProcessing ML Sub Committee
Why ECMA OOXML is not a Free Document standard [odfalliance.in] :Paper By Dr. Nagarjuna
My Earlier Post : Defeat M$ efforts to push Ecma OOXML in Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) [movingrepublic.org] Economic Times Report says
Shame on You InfosysRe:Respect (Score:4, Informative)
No, Microsoft's statement was:
Amir Majidimehr, head of Microsoft's consumer media technology group.
It's called "plausible deniability".
Re:score 1 for professionalism, correctness, carin (Score:3, Informative)
Re:123 countries vote for a standard (Score:5, Informative)
Some of those countries "participating" are observers.
This is the best explanation of the voting process I have seen.w ound.html [robweir.com]
http://www.robweir.com/blog/2007/02/merely-flesh-
Re:Is ODF really much better? (Score:5, Informative)
There's no comparison, ODF is a complete description of a document, OOXML has things like "use word 95 rules" or "important undocumented binary blob here". OOXML is a Trojan horse.
Re:How many no votes are needed? How many cast? (Score:1, Informative)
Re:"Technical Issues" (Score:2, Informative)
Technical issues can be fixed by changing the text, whilst General Comments (vague hand-wavey things) will be taken on board. Everything you mention could be classed as a technical issue, even the existance of OOXML could be considered a technical issue with ODF (whether OOXML actually offers anything over ODF is debatable, but a serious technical discussion would take on board the points raised by the OOXML text and look for the best resolution. Of course, it is hard to have a serious technical discussion when Microsoft are paying most of the members). General comments can be useful too (for example, a general comment could ask voting members to keep in mind that there is not a single working implementation of OOXML, not even Microsoft Office supports it, thus the market dominance of Microsoft Office and the disruption caused by any change of this does not work in OOXML's favour any more than ODF's, since both can be implemented in Microsoft Office if Microsoft bothered to do it but at the moment neither are. This kind of thing is important to mention, even though it is not a problem with the text of the specification).
I would encourage anyone who can to send comments to their representative body, visit http://www.noooxml.org/ [noooxml.org] to find out yours (I live in the UK and sadly our deadline passed months ago)
Re:Is ODF really much better? (Score:3, Informative)
It will be in ODF 1.2. What version of OOXML will address its critics' points?