India Third to Appeal ISO's OOXML Approval 99
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "India is now the third country to appeal the ISO's approval of OOXML, with their appeal arriving just before the deadline last night. According to PC World, this makes OOXML the first BRM process under ISO/JTC 1 to be appealed, which leaves us in uncharted territory. Although there was substantial confusion in the comments on yesterday's story, Brazil is really appealing, not merely disapproving, of OOXML, having sent a letter that begins with 'The Associação Brasileira de Normas Técnicas (ABNT), as a P member of ISO/IEC/JTC1/SC34, would like to present, to ISO/IEC/JTC1 and ISO/IEC/JTC1/SC34, this appeal for reconsideration of the ISO/IEC DIS 29500 final result.' Groklaw speculates that this may have something to do with Microsoft hedging their bets by supporting ODF 1.1 in Office 2007, though we probably won't see any more countries appeal now that the deadline has passed."
Fast Track (Score:5, Interesting)
A 4th appeal is just speculation right now... (Score:1, Interesting)
In other words, it's not surprising there's so much confusion in the reporting, because so many crazy things are going on. We have no proof of a 4th beyond a maybe, and there might be technicalities upon which to disqualify some of these and... Oogh.
- I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property [eff.org]
Yawn... Is This Important? (Score:1, Interesting)
Yes, yes in the *future* all will better. And we will have solved world hunger, poverty and what have you...
Yes I am frustrated because I F****G wish they would make Open Office a REAL competitor to Office.
For example Calc in OO now has the ability to go beyond 256 columns... Wow, progress! NOT!
Maybe if OO became a REAL competitor Microsoft would think much harder about playing nice!
If you say, "hey you have the sources..." No, I want to pay for a Microsoft competitor!
Re:Fourth country on the way (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:MS losing business to OOo? (Score:5, Interesting)
We only buy Microsoft and Dell for most things. We just bought an expensive Sharepoint Server, when a simple wiki would have saved tons of money. We use Linux, Unix and Solaris only in implementations largely dictated to us by vendors.
I think it makes sense to save money by going to OpenOffice, but corporate America doesn't always make sense.
Re: What? (Score:3, Interesting)
Sure, it's a poor way of doing business, shitting money that is, but large corporations do it all the time on stupid stuff. I mean just look at IE and silverlight. You can't say either of those was ever particularly centered on profit. IE alone has probably cost MS billions in terms of extra exploit patching and anti-trust litigation. And even under ideal circumstances, it lacks a way of bringing in money.
Re:MS losing business to OOo? (Score:4, Interesting)
Which is why they'll be overtaken by hungrier organisations that do make sense.
Re:Three countries wasting taxpayers' money (Score:5, Interesting)
It couldn't possibly be because the proposed standard was too complex and too defective to be fast tracked in the 1st place? Consider that over 80% of the problems with the specification had soloutions proposed by ECMA but "due to lack of time" not reviewed or discussed. The committee should have been able to review and if needed revise those "solutions". The fact that one private body was given unsupervised control of "fixes" when it was supposed to be the committee composed of National representatives that had the actual say to me is a good enough reason to appeal.
All that of course ignores the ongoing scandals and accusations that the system was twisted by Microsofts wealth and power rather than following the rules.
An excerpt from South Africas appeal giving the core of their reasons.
It appears that they are appealing not to satisfy peoples hatred of Microsoft but because the rules state that appeals should be launched for one of 3 reasons all of which South Africa feels apply.
Re:Fourth country on the way (Score:4, Interesting)
Remind them that (Score:1, Interesting)
They know.
Re:Appeal after the standard was passed? (Score:4, Interesting)
Imagine this: The country of Lithuanistan is a voting member of ISO. United Megacorp has a smaller standards body like ECMA put a standard they cooked up on the ISO fast-track process. Everything proceeds as expected and the Lithuanistanian national body votes YES on the standard, even though most Lithuanistanian techies are very sceptical about it. A week after the vote, though, someone from UniMeg leaks documents that show that the entire Lithuanistanian NB had been bought off by UniMeg and they didn't vote because the standard hat merit but because they liked their new cars.
Lithuanistan is pissed. They want a chance to stop the standardization process (or at least freeze it for further investigation), now that they can prove it has been tampered with. However, all votes have already been cast. This appeals process is what they'd use: If you have doubt that the standardization process went as it should you can appeal before the standard becomes final.