OOXML Will Pass Amid Massive Irregularities

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.

revelations from brazil

[rafaspol]

Finally: the details about the final results of the BRM [homembit.com]

Re:I Don't Get It?

[nawcom]

Um, do you understand how OOXML is set up? it's not like ODF or anything at all.

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.

Re:Reasons to hate OOXML

[betterunixthanunix]

0. Forgot about HTML in my last post.
1. OpenDocument already exists. What good does a second format, based on identical principles, do for the world?
2. OOXML requires the use of patented algorithms, which makes open source developers nervous, especially when a company that despises open source and has an ongoing campaign to kill the open source movement happens to be the patent holder...and happens to be pushing the format.
3. OOXML is exceedingly difficult to implement, giving Microsoft an automatic advantage over everyone else and forcing us to play catch-up (though OOo3 will have native support, IIRC).
4. This is /., and the format is Microsoft supported. What did you expect?

Re:I Don't Get It?

[calebt3]

From http://www.noooxml.org/open:rejectooxmlnow [noooxml.org]

20 good reasons to disapprove OOXML

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. ... 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.
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

Re:I Don't Get It?

[AJWM]

Why does /. hate OOXML so much? Every time a story is ran about OOXML, everyone on /. seems to scream revolution and blasphemy.

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 /. hates that, see the results of the current poll about how many books a year slashdotters read.

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.)

Re:This is getting ridiculous

[Anonymous Coward]

Still gowing, low unemployment

In case you hadn't noticed, even the President admits we are in a recession. The unemployment rate in my state is at a 4-year high. In 2004 the unemployment rate in my state was the highest it had been since 1993 when we were still recovering from the Bush Sr recession.

Last election was a landslide.

Which last election are you referring to? In 2004 Bush got 50.7% of the popular vote versus Kerry's 48.3%. I would hardly call that a landslide; unless you're counting pro-large-corporation in which case it's 99% in favor.

In 2006, The U.S. House lost 30 Republicans and the Senate lost 6. That was a clear expression of disapproval with the status quo.

Re:Can ISO de-recognise standards?

[VirusEqualsVeryYes]

Standards can be withdrawn by committee. From the ISO website [iso.org]:

All International Standards are reviewed at the least three years after publication and every five years after the first review by all the ISO member bodies. A majority of the P-members [participating members] of the TC/SC [Technical/SubCommittee] decides whether an International Standard should be confirmed, revised or withdrawn.

Withdrawing standards isn't unprecedented [iso.org], and they've even considered withdrawing JPEG entirely [imaging-resource.com].

Re:This is getting ridiculous

[lskovlund]

They did not bribe. They stacked the panel [groklaw.net].

Re:Hollow victory

[jimmyhat3939]

It's actually more of a victory than that. The whole point of this is that many organizations (governments, corporations) have said they want to store their documents in an ISO-recognized file format.

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.

Re:So they aren't corrupt, but...

[arth1]

What's the quote? Never ascribe to malice what can adequately be explained by ignorance?

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

Re:This is getting ridiculous

[darkfire5252]

I'm with AC here. Are Groklaw, etc, really suggesting that several standards bodies in several nations are /all/ corrupt? And not one leak? Not one failed, incorruptible whistleblower?

Well, I am all about questioning the groupthink, but you're missing something. Stories like the above are the leaks you're looking for. These are written by people who are/were involved with their country's standardization process and feel that there's a problem with what happened.

If you can read German, here's the story on what happened there. For those who can't, when they went to vote, they were not allowed to vote disapprove, so the choice was to approve or to abstain. It was a tie, 6:6, which means no consensus. [...] the representative from DIN decided to cast a vote, which isn't the process. DIN isn't supposed to vote, because it's supposed to advise. But this, they rationalized, was a vote not about whether to accept OOXML on the basis of *technical* issues, but whether to accept the approval suggestion of the technical committee. So DIN voted to accept DIN's suggestion. Hence Germany ends up in the Approve column.

That's a German 'whistleblower' who is familiar with how the process should run and is stating that it did not run that way.

Here's an article from Norway [...] The article says there should be an investigation of the irregularities there, because while there were only two votes to approve, from Microsoft and a business partner, Statoilhydro, and all the others voted no, 21 votes [...] So they put everyone out of the room, and Standards Norway, three people were left in the room, and they usurped the decision and made it their business to decide to approve anyway.

There's another independent report from another country. The list goes on... One should always be skeptical of believing in massive cover-ups and the like, but let's be honest here: there are plenty of legitimate signs that something untoward is going on.

Re:The ISO has just lost their credability

[Anonymous Coward]

OASIS. They're the ones who run the ODF process. The chair leaving ISO (well technically ISO/IEC JTC1 SC34) suggested that people go there for development. ITTF. They rely on two independent implementations of a standard in order to verify that the documentation is correct. W3C. HTML5 has been good (well, when they were forced to get off their ass and not hand the future of the web to Flash/Flex and SilverLight). There's also OpenISO.org but that's just a few guys I think. Probably doesn't have the credibility.

Re:I Don't Get It?

[dh003i]

Summarily, only someone who is (1) a complete idiot, (2) completely incompetent regarding issues of standard, (3) extremely iased, or (4) paid-off, could possibly say crap like, "OOXML is a great standard", or recommend it for approval.

Re:time to start expelling

[Anonymous Coward]

Expulsion of Ecma ... Tim Bray writes, "This was horrible, egregious, process abuse and ISO should hang their heads in shame for allowing it to happen. Their reputation, in my eyes, is in tatters. My opinion of ECMA was already very negative; this hasn't improved it, and if ISO doesn't figure out away to detach this toxic leech, this kind of abuse is going to happen again and again." [tbray.org]

Duplicative standards conflict with WTO rules

[walterbyrd]

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20080327170359776 [groklaw.net]

"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.

Microsoft Approves Itself

[BanjoBob]

From our friends at Groklaw [groklaw.net]...

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.

You forgot to mention

[celtic_hackr]

That the OOXML proposed standard is already outdated, because MS Office doesn't use it. If you apply OOXML to a Word Document you'll not get the entire document in it's original format. So, any Archiving of Word documents still won't be retrievable by anything other than the version of Word they were created on. in other words the OOXMl standard is nothing but a big fat lie, because it is not used by any word processor on the planet. A worthless time consuming attempt at a standard that has zero usefulness. But, Microsoft has gotten it's way, again, by hook and crook and just plain old BS. Personally I don't see how they can keep pulling this stuff and getting away with it. It really is amazing how they do it. If they were to apply these skills for good we could probably have World Peace.

Re:Standards process failure?

[Anonymous Coward]

The thing is that the ISO process is funded by the body submitting the standard. Microsoft/Ecma paid for the BRM in Geneva, the officials to run it, the Ecma editors and the organisation, and the press releases that came out. The ISO have employees but they don't want to get their meal ticket angry.

It's easy to blame the National Bodies for voting the way they did (and sometimes they deserve that blame) but the ISO ran the Fast Track process and could have stopped it earlier. They continued on, and received funding from their vendor.

I mean just read this pleasant ISO review of the meeting [www.iec.ch] that participants describe as a sham and disgusting process abuse [tbray.org]. The ISO are in denial that there's any abuse going on.

We need to keep telling people the real story here. They can't be allowed to forget this. Their reputation is in the drain, but they must be held accountable.

Re:This is getting ridiculous

[mikeb]

You can try

BSI British Standards
389 Chiswick High Road
London
W4 4AL

Telephone: [phone]
Fax: [phone]
Email: [e-mail]

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.

Re:This is getting ridiculous

[SgtChaireBourne]

I'm with AC here. Are Groklaw, etc, really suggesting that several standards bodies in several nations are /all/ corrupt? And not one leak? Not one failed, incorruptible whistleblower? ...

No. Groklaw simply links to the whistleblowers. Such astroturfing doesn't work anymore, pretending there wasn't two years of ongoing outrage only works in Redmond and doesn't fool anyone here.

What about in Zimbabwe?

[Circlotron]

The elections there seem to have a parallel with this whole situation.
A few for; many against. The strongest stays in power regardless of what the majority wants.

Re:This is getting ridiculous

[schon]

get their document format adopted as an ISO standard--something which will yield them little to no gain

I guess you haven't really been following along, but there is *MASSIVE* [kairosnews.org] benefit [virtuelvis.com] to getting [ct.gov] MS's proprietary [ca.gov] standard [state.mn.us] declared "open".

But I'm sure you'll counter with the absurd assertion that MS doesn't need to maintain lock-in, because they already have a monopoly, right?

Shame on ISO, delivering political IT standards

[omz]

Irregularities and political decisions in ISO DIS 29500 March 2008 votes:

Germany

In a steering committee of 20 people a vote was taken to answer this question: "did the process run according to the rules and without irregularities?"

6 answered no and 7 abstained!

http://www.noooxml.org/forum/t-49525/limited-choice-at-german-din [noooxml.org] http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=2008032913190768 [groklaw.net]

Norway

21 members of the committee voted NO to fast-track this DIS but it was decided to vote yes anyway.

http://www.noooxml.org/forum/t-50031/oil-fire-in-norway-microsoft-buys-another-standards-body [noooxml.org]

Denmark

The technical committee didn't agree to change the disapproval vote but it was "decided" to vote yes anyway.

The committee S-142/U-34 under Danish Standards could not agree to change their vote from No to Yes.

A couple of hours later:

http://www.version2.dk/artikel/6718 [version2.dk] says that the announcement from Danish Standards will not be made until Friday and that the Chair of the committee has been barred from speaking about the result of yesterday's meeting.

After some Microsoft political intervention to revert this ( the Prime Minister of Denmark is a Microsoft friend ), we have this: http://www.en.ds.dk/4227 [en.ds.dk]

Another political decision, influenced by Microsoft lobbyists.

Malaysia

The Minister of Science, Technology and Innovation decided on Malaysia's final position on OOXML ("abstain" ), overturning the 81% "Disapprove" position by ISC-G and TC4.

http://www.openmalaysiablog.com/2008/03/the-minister-of.html [openmalaysiablog.com] http://www.openmalaysiablog.com/2008/03/malaysian-indus.html [openmalaysiablog.com]

Poland

On March 20, 2008, Technical Committee (KT 182) of PKN was supposed to either accept the recommendation (which was to vote YES for the proposed standard) or not accept it, and thus recommend PKN to vote NO or abstain from voting. Of 45 members, 24 appeared on the meeting. And the votes looked like this:

• 12 votes supporting the reccomendation,
• 10 votes rejecting it,
• 2 abstaining to vote.

No consensus has been achieved concerning the recommendation. Thus, the chairman of KT 182, Elzbieta Andrukiewicz, decided to allow the missing members to vote by e-mail during the next 10 days (till the end of March).

The email vote was taken, counting a "no mail sended" as an "approval" !!!

Clearly, there was no technical consensus in Poland, but the chairman forced the rules to favour an approval.

http://www.noooxml.org/forum/t-49455/polish-chairwoman-distributes-microsoft-propaganda [noooxml.org] http://polishlinux.org/poland/possible-manipulation-around-ooxml-process-in-poland/ [polishlinux.org] http://polishlinux.org/poland/poland-confirms-its-approval-for-ooxml-in-iso/ [polishlinux.org]

Croatia

Out of 35 members of TO Z1, 17 sent a vote, and there were three votes for, and fourteen against fast-tracking OOXML, which is relative rejection rate of 82%. Members who voted were individual experts, IBM, CLUG and HrOpen. However, since there were less than 51% of votes, the voting process was declared invalid, and the previous vote holds ( "approve" ) !

M

Ignorance my azz

[walterbyrd]

"August 30, 2007 (Computerworld) -- Microsoft Corp. admitted Wednesday that an employee at its Swedish subsidiary offered monetary compensation to partners for voting in favor of the Office Open XML document format's approval as an ISO standard."

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9033701 [computerworld.com]

Now tell me that's not corruption.