Norwegian Standards Body Members Resign Over OOXML 208
tsa writes "Ars Technica reports that 13 of the 23 members from the technical committee of the Norwegian standards body, the organization that manages technical standards for the country, have resigned because of the way the OOXML standardization was handled. We've previously discussed Norway's protest and ISO's rejection of other appeals. From the article: 'The standardization process for Microsoft's office format has been plagued with controversy. Critics have challenged the validity of its ISO approval and allege that procedural irregularities and outright misconduct marred the voting process in national standards bodies around the world. Norway has faced particularly close scrutiny because the country reversed its vote against approval despite strong opposition to the format by a majority of the members who participated in the technical committee.'"
Re:Conflicted (Score:1, Interesting)
My first thought was "It's good that these people are taking a stand against injustice.", but my second thought was "These principled people just resigned. Norway's board is entirely corrupt now." Bummer.
Bummer? Not really. There isn't really any good reason to stay on the board and give it legitimacy when the entire process is corrupt. Do you honestly think that their input mattered or could have changed anything?
Can the EU courts look at this? (Score:1, Interesting)
I can't believe no laws were broken in this process. Why can't the EU courts take this up?
The right thing to do. (Score:1, Interesting)
Would you want your name on something you completely disagree with? Leaving with a loud public stink is the right thing to do when technical matters have been nerfed aside by asshats like M$. The next thing to do is form a proper standards body and protect it from shenanigans. You can't always keep others from doing evil things but you can always refuse to cooperate. ISO's leadership will not be able to ignore this for long.
Re:Boycott Novell has More to the Story. (Score:3, Interesting)
For anyone [slashdot.org] thinks this "conversation" is a little strange, twitter, "right handed" and "inTheLoo" are the same person.
It will help... (Score:3, Interesting)
...if (and only if) those principled individuals set up a rival standards organization, have as part of their charter that they refute corruption and automatically negate standards tainted by corruption, re-certify where legal all known-to-be-"safe" standards under their own name, and then lobby research shops and companies hurt by the ISO scandal to work with them. Fork the certification market, but because of rebranding existing standards, no other standards body would ever need to be involved.
Another alternative - standards bodies rely on the income from charging absurd fees for standards, relying more on secrecy than anything. If you pay enough for a standard, you won't just give it away, in theory. If some suitably rich investor with lots of contacts and enough cunning bought up copies of those standards and then just dumped them onto public sites, it could cripple standards organizations for a long time. If it was clearly linked to the ISO debacle, ISO might not be too keen to be seen to complain - most countries deem bribery (even outside of government) a more serious offense than a petty trade secret violation and the press are more into scandals (which ISO is undoubtedly riddled with) than knuckle-rapping.
The Inquirer story has a translation (Score:4, Interesting)
http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2008/10/02/norway-standards-members-walk [theinquirer.net]
I was shocked by how excellent the "rough Google translation" was. Unless they had a human clean up the translation a bit, that is amazingly good English prose for a machine translator to emit. (I can't speak for how accurate it is, but it seems plausible enough.)
English is a mess, with lots of irregular usages. How about Norwegian -- is it particularly easy or particularly hard to translate?
steveha
balanced reporting? (Score:1, Interesting)
It's worth pointing out that only one of the resigning members was a member of the SN/K 185 committee before OOXML was brought in for review.
These are essentially members that joined principally to block OOXML as a standard, and have been very vocal in their opposition.
Given their "OOXML - Go to Hell" public demonstrations, their professionalism and objectivity should probably be taken with a pinch of salt.
Re:How soon people forget ... (Score:5, Interesting)
I took a hiatus too. I didn't miss the show - I was just sidelined playing with stuff I knew was good. It didn't take me more than three months of Windows development to figure out that it was a trap. The last month of that I spent looking for specifications for a sound card so I could do audio capture before I discovered that the company that wrote the drivers for SoundBlaster was actually a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary that wasn't giving up the specs at any price or terms I could live with.
OS X bought [opengroup.org] Unix certification because it was an important selling point. They had to do significant engineering to qualify for the mark, but they have it not in recognition of their engineering, but because they licensed the right to call OS X a Unix from The Open Group.
Unix is not what it was in the 1960s and 1970s - the love child of great minds. It's now just a service mark. A brand. Intellectual property law ruined it, and Ransom Love killed it with his hubris. It's time to let it go.
Re:is there ANYone to explain me why parent (Score:4, Interesting)
I wasn't commenting on that, I was commenting on the 7 sockpuppet conversation that twitter decided to have with himself at the start of the comments.
I am seriously beginning to question his sanity - I mean, in the last 6 months he's accused me of sending him death threats, of working for Microsoft and of harbouring multiple Slashdot accounts, none of which are remotely true and the latter being supreme hypocrisy. He's a newspaper headline waiting to happen.
are there any morons among us, who are STILL saying that microsoft did nothing wrong in this ooxml scandal ?
Come to mention it, some actual concrete proof would be nice, but I've already found out that I'm as likely to get that as Ellen Degeneres is of settling down with a nice man. Call me a moron if you like, but I tend to like evidence that isn't circumstantial groklawed hogwash before accusing people of anything.
A lot of people on Slashdot forget how many companies rely on Microsoft's dominance of the market to make a living. Instead of thinking "Well, maybe the reason a lot of companies registered to vote is because their profit margin relies on OOXML becoming a standard", they instead jump to the most extreme conclusion they can find.
Re:Conflicted (Score:5, Interesting)
You miss the point.
Norwegians still have a concept in their culture of a "scandal" that isn't just juicy, salacious news.
Article is BS? (Score:3, Interesting)
While MS pulled some dirty tricks to get OOXML approved and many of us are rightfully questioning ISO's credibility, this article appears to be (at best) sensationalizing things according to one of the arstechnica comments: