ISO Relevance Questioned After OOXML Appeals Fail 236
Cowards Anonymous passes along an Australian PCWorld piece that begins "Countries whose appeals were dismissed regarding the ISO/IEC's approval of Microsoft's OOXML as an international standard are questioning the judgment and relevance of the ISO/IEC and the standards they approve. In a statement made at the Congresso Internacional Sociedade e Governo Electronico (CONSEGI) 2008 conference, representatives from three of the four countries that appealed against an April 1 vote to approve OOXML as a standard said they are 'no longer confident' in the ability of both the International Organization for Standardization and the International Electrotechnical Commission to be vendor-neutral and open when it comes to setting technology standards." Here is the statement signed by South Africa, Brazil, Venezuela, Ecuador, Paraguay, and Cuba. The countries won't pursue further opposition to OOXML.
Re:Does ISO still matter?? (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes. Yes it does.
Imagine you know jack about technology (like, let's say, the average CEO). Then you have to turn to someone to tell you whether something or someone is capable of accomplishing some task. So what do you do? You start looking for standards, check what those standards describe, find out if it applies to you and look for tools that work according to that standard.
You can't decide whether the tool you choose is really "good". You can't decide whether someone who happens to be certified according to some certs can actually do something (I've seen ISO 27001 people who didn't know jack about real security problems, you can't certify something that changes faster than you can slap a standard together). But when you don't know you have to believe (ask the religious guys, they know best about that). And CEOs tend to believe industry standards. Whether those standards actually "work" or are arbitrary doesn't matter. Well, it does matter, but they don't really have a choice. It's "as good as it gets" for them.
Compatibility is a huge issue in today's economy. You have to be able to send your documents to your partners and expect them to be able to use them. Standardized formats play a big role in this game. Those formats may be bad, dated, horribly insecure and a vendor lock-in, but they are standardized and thus compatible with the companies you deal with.
That's what CEOs care about.
Re:stop complaining (Score:3, Interesting)
deal with it, it isnt the end of the world.
It is if you are the unfortunate bastard who has to figure out how to read in a Mickeysoft Word doc and convert it to another format! What do you do when a section is tagged as "Format like Word 95"?!
metzomagic
This seriously sucks (Score:4, Interesting)
Standards can be wrong or incomplete but they are still completely vital to the proper functioning of modern computing.
If Microsoft's dodgy dealings have managed to invalidate trust in one of the main standards bodies, thereby making less people adhere to standards, this will be a serious blow to interoperable computing in the future.
Iso Vs Reality (Score:5, Interesting)
What annoys me the most about cases such as this is the fact that they get little to no coverage in my nations media. No mention in any newspaper at all. Then again it's no big surprise since the "newspapers" are looking more like tabloids every day.
Re:So let me get this straight. (Score:5, Interesting)
It's more than that. Microsoft pushed countries that otherwise would have had no interest in the process to sign on as voting members. They also stuffed country committee meetings with their own people and in one case got caught paying people to attend.
It was so bad that the working group responsible is now paralyzed because too many of the new countries who signed on as voting members can't even be bothered to vote on anything that's not OOXML.
This is not just a disagreeable decision. It's an abuse of process.
What ISO is supposed to be about (Score:5, Interesting)
As a matter of fact, what will become the ISO/IEC standard on OOXML is not likely to be truly implemented by anyone. Microsoft has already announced that they will not anytime soon implement the changes relative to the OOXML format that they're currently using.
Just be glad we have a standard that we can work from
Why would anyone want to "work from" the ISO/IEC version of the OOXML specification?
Re:Does ISO still matter?? (Score:4, Interesting)
Really, I really mean this question.
As long as no significantly more credible replacement exists, ISO will continue to matter, at least with respect to government procurement (which again sends strong signals to the economy as a whole) -- even in fields like informatics where practically all knowledgeable people primarily look elsewhere for standards.
Replacing ISO is not an easy task, but IMO it needs to be done. If you're willing to help, please join the effort at OpenISO.org [openiso.org]
EU Commission (Score:2, Interesting)
France has nothing to gain from this, and yet (Score:5, Interesting)
We have nothing to gain from funneling money into Microsoft's coffers.
But here are a few facts:
1. Sarkozy is best buds with the head of MS France
2. At the national std org (AFNOR) meeting, there was an overwhelming consensus towards voting "no"
3. The day before the final ISO vote, someone at the office of the president called our rep to the ISO
4. Our vote switched to "abstain", magically. This allowed OOXML to pass.
Corruption. There is no other word for it. It's interesting that Venezuela, Brasil, and Cuba voted, basically, against corruption. That should tell you something about what kind of "truth" we're being fed about those countries. (And no, hold your strawmen, I'm not implying that Castro is an angel.)
We [april.org] asked for explanations about this vote; I don't think they even bothered to respond.
But: We can replace ISO (Score:5, Interesting)
That's how politics come to a close about an issue. Those who lost complain, publicly, loudly, and with no effect whatsoever on the process itself. Then everyone goes back to business.
You can love it or hate it, but if you watch enough politics closely enough, you see this pattern repeat over and over and over again.
There's a difference here though: In most political contexts, nonviolently establishing an alternative process is prohibitively difficult.
In this context, it's still difficult, but much easier. ISO is not an intergovernmental organization. It's just simply a private-sector organization with seat in Geneva. Nothing and nobody has the right stop us from setting up a competing organization [openiso.org].
The key challenge is in convincing governments that the new organization is more worthy of paying attention to than ISO/IEC JTC1. In this context it's very good news that some governments are expressing doubts about ISO/IEC.
Note that since nations are sovereign, it is not necessary for an organization that aims to become a better alternative to ISO/IEC to convince a majority of countries. Even convincing a handful of countries is probably enough if a heavyweight like e.g. Brazil or India is among them, since that would suffice for putting very strong pressure on e.g. Microsoft to allow true interoperability.
On OOXML (Score:2, Interesting)
It's amazing how poor countries can't be bought... (Score:4, Interesting)
I mean you'd expect western countries to have a certain level of integrity... Whereas less wealthy countries usually would be easier to bribe, but I guess not...
Okay, you can discuss whether or not the different countries/TC's was bribed, but dirty tricks were played!
Re:Does ISO still matter?? (Score:5, Interesting)
"pseudo-technical community"
Lets ignore your direct attack to Slashdot community which we sometimes see non anonymous comments of industry leader companies CEOs and people having written World standard RFCs... What about "more serious looking" Sun Microsystems and IBM which itself larger than many countries represented in ISO?
If you suggest a Windows only standard with a very suspicious voting process which even involves some dictatorships, you are irrelevant. You should be investigated and punished too if there was money involved.
Being "ISO" really doesn't make them untouchable. Same goes for Microsoft too. They should be investigated by a international court as bribery (via money or other things) is a very serious crime.
Re:The answer is simple (Score:3, Interesting)
Add Apple too. By giving "Read only" support to ODF, they put their weight behind ODF. "Text Edit.app" is a very important piece of software ;)
Also my Symbian S80 Nokia 9300 can open/edit ODF documents via freeware. It is important thing since, it shows ODF is that easy to implement on anything. Symbian S80 is one of the weirdest portable OS'es you can find, even Nokia got rid of it in E90 upgrade (it is S60).
Re:stop complaining ask a flawed mind (Score:1, Interesting)
If a country's view of things is so distorted by business interests (think monetary) that it loses its ability to see and think clearly about ethical issues then that country hopelessly corrupt and has no real future. And that includes the US.
BTW, I've always been a patriotic American. The Star Spangled Banner still gives me goose bumps. But, seeing the corruption so blatantly displayed as it was in the OOXML debacle. That NB's are so corrupted as to allow this and then not have it become a major issue in the press tells me the US is very close to its demise.
The greatest nation ever is self-destructing.
Re:What's new there, though? (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, but GSM is a different standard. ISO 216 doesn't say anything about that. As far as ISO 216 is concerned, I could make a sheet that's 210mm × 297mm x 3000mm, in effect a _pillar_ with an A4 cross-section, and it would still count as ISO/DIN A4.
As for C99, exactly who implemented a C99 compiler faithfully or at all?
- GCC's own Status of C99 features in GCC [gnu.org] page lists a _lot_ of C99 features as missing or broken.
- Visual C++ at least as of 2005 did _not_ support C99. Some 6 years after the standard had been passed. A quick search on MSDN leads me to believe that VS 2008 doesn't either.
- Borland AFAIK never did.
- a quick googling on Sun's site leads me to believe that their implementation is also not quite complete and compliant
- a quick googling on IBM's site, produced "Not all run-time functions and facilities required by the ISO/IEC 9899:1999 International Standard are supported on all the operating system levels that can run this version of the compiler." in the relevant section of IBM C for AIX v6.0. I wouldn't know if newer versions even exist, or how that was updated.
Sorry, if I don't have the time for the full research that this deserves. But so far it looks like, basically, if I could be arsed to, I could probably write some standard-compliant C99 code which doesn't even compile on _any_ major C compiler. Does that sound like the OOXML situation yet? :P
Re:Does ISO still matter?? (Score:3, Interesting)
Microsoft is very much afraid of the domino effect but in fact their ISO activities mainstreamed the idea to challenge the bully with governmental action. ODF is quickly gaining ground
relevance and irrelevance (Score:3, Interesting)
Standards bodies have always had a mixed record.
In some cases (e.g. early ANSI C), they did a reasonable job bringing together practitioners and standardizing and documenting a mature technology.
In other cases (e.g., ALGOL 68, MPEG-7), they brought together a bunch of academics who thought they could use the standards body to realize their untested and unrealistic ideas.
Neither of those cases is relevant anymore; people can communicate and build consensus over the Internet.
Where standards bodies still matter is in a legal sense: a standards body can guarantee that a "promise not to sue" actually has some legal force behind it, in the form of a binding agreement between the standards body and the vendor participants.
Of course, that requires a standards body that actually takes this aspect of standardization seriously and doesn't make exceptions. ECMA dropped the ball on this.