Norway's Yes-To-OOXML Is Formally Protested 324
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.'"
Money can't buy you love. (Score:5, Interesting)
Or truth or science. A lie is a lie no matter how many people you pay to repeat it. Corruption has no place in any technical organization that will be litened to and respected.
Groklaw predicts more challenges [groklaw.net]
and notes the results will now be announced on Wednesday [reuters.com], so and ISO standard for M$XML is not going to be one of the worst April Fools jokes of the next decade.Stupid governments (Score:5, Interesting)
This is why we need open source governance.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source_governance [wikipedia.org]
Nice Sentiment (Score:5, Interesting)
I leave it to the EU (as the US DoJ clearly has no interest in this any more) to take Microsoft to task, and hopefully empty their coffers a little bit. That seems to be the only thing to be done with Microsoft until the time comes when they're anti-competitive behavior is finally met by government agencies of sufficient power to break the company up.
Yes, money can buy you love (Score:5, Interesting)
Norway corrupt too? (Score:3, Interesting)
Why is this corruption syndrome, typical of the USA cropping up in very successful [European] countries? Why?
Quality base-level of ISO very LOW (Score:5, Interesting)
If you want to see how bad was this process handled, see one of its awfuls deliverables.
Open the document "Response_DE-0028_dates_v9.doc" in this zip
http://www.itscj.ipsj.or.jp/sc34/open/0989_reference_docs.zip [ipsj.or.jp]
This is one of the changes frenetically [ece.ntua.gr] accepted [tbray.org] in BRM, regarding treatments of dates in OOXML. See the salad of colors trying to explain the modifications. And this is a fix ( BRM ) of a fix ( one of ECMA 1027 proposed fixes ) of a NB comment of a draft text ( original ECMA submission ).
And this document contradicts this another BRM document: http://www.itscj.ipsj.or.jp/sc34/open/0989.pdf [ipsj.or.jp] because the first says that the .DOC file replaces ECMA responses 18 and 43 but the "Response_DE-0028_dates_v9.doc" document says that it replaces ECMA responses 18, 43, 76 and 690 !
ECMA and Microsoft have not provided a final text with all this changes applied. In the BRM they frenetically changed Scope, Conformance , Schemas , and lot of normative text. Microsoft is now rushing to get a final text in less than one month, to comply with ISO normative.
This is how ISO delivers IT international standards, mandating fundamental changes to drafts, leaving national bodies with the only alternative to cast a political [slashdot.org] vote leaving aside the technical content of the specification.
Congratulations to the countries that had *balls* and didn't agree with this way of deliver standards to people:
And congratulations Microsoft, your friendly little countries supposedly experts in XML document description languages ;-) ( now ISO P-members ), who joined ISO JTC1 just to cast an unconditional-yes-votes [noooxml.org] payed off:
Re:Microsoft is like the weather: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Nice Sentiment (Score:5, Interesting)
With Microsoft's Office monopoly becoming further entrenched as a side effect. Haha, side effect? More like the point of the whole operation.
Here's the deal as it stands right now (or rather shortly before this farce began):
- ISO was well respected.
- Open Document Format was accepted by ISO as a standard.
These two things combined give Open Office (and any suite that implements ODF, since its an ACTUAL open standard so you can do that) a lot of built-in approval, and makes them look very good to governments/organizations who are starting to mandate open formats for documentation. This is bad for MS, half of their business being the Office monopoly (which supports and is supported by the Windows monopoly).
So what's their strategy here? Well one (or both) of two things happen:
- Their BS non-open "open standard" is accepted, so they can claim their format meets the needs of governments who mandate open standards.
- ISO is no longer respected as a standards organization, so their approval of ODF no longer means as much.
Whichever happens, their little problem with ODF being a standard goes away and MS Office remains the only "standard" (de-facto or ISO-approved) that matters. They don't really care which. Oh no, their manipulation of the process is exposed! Guess that means you can't trust ISO any more! Frankly I give even odds to both happening. But even if ISO ends up rejecting OOXML, it's going to take a hell of a lot to stop the second from happening.
Re:There's an important lesson here (Score:5, Interesting)
As a good parent, I let her. That's the "fair" way to cheat, but I don't let her make them up as she goes like Hillary Clinton and Microsoft. I make sure we agree to the rules before we play.
The ISO should have done the same. I hope Microsoft is up against the wall for this crap.
--
Toro
Re:twitter is everywhere!! (Score:2, Interesting)
I have? In what context? I'm not sure if you're being facetious or not, but if I did, I apologize.
Maybe one of these days I'll waste an hour writing the "Twitter Failure Log" and document all of his sockpuppets. God knows he's dumb enough to post things like [slashdot.org] these [slashdot.org] that make it easier. But no, I'm not seeing things at all. Take this thread, he's posted with three different accounts so far, plus two AC posts. twitter thinks he's clever, but his writing patterns give him away immediately.
Just look at the posting histories for Erris, twitter, inTheLoo, Mactrope and gnutoo. It's just amazing how they keep replying and running to each other, isn't it?
Without a doubt. However, this has nothing to do with Microsoft. How would you like for me to create five different accounts and then have a conversation (about any topic) where you think you're talking to five different people? That's the epitome of dishonesty, which is amusing considering he spends all his waking hours bemoaning the fact that Microsoft is dishonest.
Anyway, I've gotten all my well-deserved offtopic moderations for the day. Unlike twitter I don't post AC and I don't have five different accounts that can shill each other. So peace out.
Re:There's an important lesson here (Score:2, Interesting)
Use the Judo Argument (Score:5, Interesting)
Further, it appears that the real reason they did this is so that they can put that all-important checkmark in the box that says, "Interoperates with ISO standard file formats" when trying to sell MS Office into accounts.
OK, great.
Now PROVE IT!
Prove that MS Office is OOXML compliant. Last I heard, OOXML was like Office 2007, but not really there. Last I heard, OOXML was an incomplete spec with no full implementation.
If Microsoft is going to to for that "ISO standard file format" checkbox, for that matter if anyone is going for an ISO standard checkbox, isn't it necessary that there be compliance testing? And long as we're compliance testing, the certification of compliance should NEVER be given until the appropriate committee evaluates the product against the spec and decides that that the product unambiguously implements the spec.
No full, unambiguous compliance, no check in the little box.
No matter how long the evaluation takes.
Re:How about a nice technical discussion? (Score:2, Interesting)
Twitter, aka:
Erris,
InTheLoo,
GnuToo,
Mactrope (YOU)
And possibly others I have yet to encounter.
This is highly deceitful. You, who accuse others of astroturfing, are baldly astroturfing yourself.
I don't care about the OOXML results, to be honest; I care about ensuring that astroturfers like you have their voices drowned out in the crowd.
Re:Nice Sentiment (Score:4, Interesting)
This is also not the first broken standard full of ambiguities out there, or the first one with politics involved, or the first one where a company with a monopolistic stake pushed a standard through. It just rises to the top because of more obvious than usual political maneuvering and the larger than normal company pushing from behind.
ISO standards are rarely highly technical guidelines created by unbiased technical people. Usually there's an existing implementation that gets to call most of the shots, or a set of conflicting implementations that maneuver to limit the amount of redesign they have to do. Which makes sense actually; creating a standard before there is an implementation or experience with the technology is often premature.
Re:Or an ISO standard for voting (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, if their current voting procedures are flawed and prone to manipulation by parties with an obvious interest in the outcome, then nothing they produce can really be trusted to be the best practice. Since it undermines everything they do as a standards body, I'd say fixing their voting procedures to eliminate the appearance of impropriety ought to be their top priority.
Re:Microsoft will die. (Score:3, Interesting)
You fail to see the point. So far, Microsoft Windows is the *ONLY* Operating System accepted by the general public. When a competitor arrives, and it's compatible with all the Windows games so far, there won't be any incentive to buy the extra-expensive operating system. Why pay when you can have something better, for free?
Just think of Schools. Government agencies. Thousands of companies which only need a copy of Excel and a few Windows-only software packages to run. In 5 years, game companies will have to face the choice: Whether to keep developing for *one* single operating system, or to develop for *various* operating systems (the Mac will only become more popular in the future, and Linux will reach its critical mass, something that Firefox already achieved).
While some WINE developers are working (and fast!) to implement DirectX 9, other developers are already doing DirectX 10 work, and are adding Vista compatibility features to WINE. So are the ReactOS guys. They already know they're working on a moving target.
And don't forget that the
You think Microsoft's cat and mouse game is a guaranteed success? Do you really think that they'll be able to make a new platform every two years, when they can barely maintain their CURRENT platform? They can't keep up with the vulnerabilities that are discovered by hackers every month!
Microsoft is stagnating. They've already stopped innovating. IE is already behind the competition in the Acid2/3 challenge. They have to change, or they'll die. The good news is that they're not changing...
Re:Yes, money can buy you love (Score:3, Interesting)
On paper, you've donated $100,000 worth of software and migth get a $30,000 tax-deduction assuming you pay 30% taxes.
In reality, you've donated something that cost you $1000 to produce, and scored a $30,000 tax-deduction.
Re:Yes, money can buy you love (Score:3, Interesting)
On paper, you've donated $100,000 worth of software and migth get a $30,000 tax-deduction assuming you pay 30% taxes.
In reality, you've donated something that cost you $1000 to produce, and scored a $30,000 tax-deduction.
Things look even better for the likes of drug companies doing this kind of thing. They can get rid of drugs which are about to expire without having any disposal costs.
Re:Yes, money can buy you love (Score:4, Interesting)
It's a method for making some money out of a drug that they've developed but which trials have shown there to be no real market for. The only reason they don't do it more often is because you're not allowed to have a tax rebate that's larger than the total amount of tax you owe, so it's capped by the value of their primary revenue. But it does mean that some drug companies don't really pay taxes. There are supposed to be laws against this, but they have so many loopholes written in that it doesn't really matter.