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Microsoft is trying by all means to get its "standard" adopted without
substantial changes despite of its thousands of officially reported
technical flaws and the pre-existence of ISO 26300:2006 (OpenDocument,
ODF) as the most appropriate international standard for the
representation of office documents.

By Dec 11 2007 delegates from your National Standard Office who will
participate in the BRM have to be announced to ISO. At least Portugal
and Ireland will be represented by Microsoft. In many other countries,
we know that Microsoft gold partners are proposing themselves as heads
of national delegations. Many of them will prevail if we do not take
action.

ODF is an international standard, no wonder the French adopt it. Open XML is a lost cause. It attempts to become the second standard for the same purpose.

There are many persons in Russia who don't like the software company. Just think of the scale of opposition to Open XML in Russia. It is a kind of base in Russia for Microsoft's interests. A minor investment.

Microsoft lobbied with all means to hinder all the National Committees to submit comments despite obvious and real flaws in the specification submitted by ECMA International. It is ridiculous spin that they now praise the number of comments received. After all fast-track is not a standard development process but for rubber-stamping ready specifications.

You find a collection of comments here compiled. The comments submitted are a tip of an iceberg. Some National bodies submitted bullshit for instance the Turks. Or Tunesia which sent Microsoft advertisements around to other national standard bodies.

More than 67000 persons signed a petition against the Open XML fast-track so far. The largest specification that was ever ISO fast-tracked. You can buy Yes Men to let national bodies conclude a "chair" is a "knife". But at the end of the day your opponents will slay you or stab you in the back. Open XML is tainted because Microsoft played against the rules. Real standardization experts get alienated by the ruthless moves of Microsoft. Either we will see an uprise against Microsoft in the standard community or a tyranny that needs to defend itself against common sense. In France Microsoft was already bailed out when they bluntly tried to put the French under pressure. More to come. The political prize of a "win" will be defeating.

Microsoft lobbied with all means to hinder all the National Committees to submit comments despite obvious and real flaws in the specification submitted by ECMA International. It is ridiculous spin that they now praise the number of comments received. After all fast-track is not a standard development process but for rubber-stamping ready specifications.

You find a collection of comments here compiled. The comments submitted are a tip of an iceberg. Some National bodies submitted bullshit for instance the Turks. Or Tunesia which sent Microsoft advertisements around to other national standard bodies.

More than 67000 persons signed a petition against the Open XML fast-track so far. The largest specification that was ever ISO fast-tracked. You can buy Yes Men to let national bodies conclude a "chair" is a "knife". But at the end of the day your opponents will slay you or stab you in the back. Open XML is tainted because Microsoft played against the rules. Real standardization experts get alienated by the ruthless moves of Microsoft. Either we will see an uprise against Microsoft in the standard community or a tyranny that needs to defend itself against common sense. In France Microsoft was already bailed out when they bluntly tried to put the French under pressure. More to come. The political prize of a "win" will be defeating.

Consider Microsoft's past. Then, consider Microsoft's most recent behaviour, which would be considered criminal elections fraud in any nominally democratic country, had it been in a political election instead of the ISO process.

At this point, you should be able to see why people would consider it unethical to support Microsoft in any way.

http://www.noooxml.org/petition

If MS wants to put forth a standard File format for ISO approval, Thats just fine. Make them FIX the problems in their proposed standard before trying to ram it through..

Point of order:

This is a kayak.

These are canoes.

That is all.

I'm not sure why it looks "easily" to corrupt ISO to you. It did take a lot of effort behind the scenes, give them credit where it's due.

if you had read the press release you would have seen that there were indeed numerous genuine candidates (i.e., noOOXML-campaigns in several countries), which said they didn't need the money - and which, for all their activism and ingenuity, didn't manage to create the same level of disgust with the format that Microsoft schieved with all the committee stuffing and other shenanigans and the total lack of reasoned argument for the proposed standard.
The best way to show that someone is an idiot is often to just let him babble...

I represented Denmark in the comittee that created the EIF and maintained the AG, so of course I read the Gartner-report with a biased view. Then again, I always tend to read documents from Gartner with a biased view. [..] If the Gartner consultants were my students, they should fear the exam, because I would confront their problem understanding, their methods, their empirical depths/shallowness, and not least their pseudo-theoretical analysis and model-amok. Having said that, I admit to finding some of their proposals pretty interesting, for example, their Generic Public Services Framework is conceptually interesting, but not very well explained and motivated.

Researchwise, the Gartner report does not go into much if any detail with respect to the national interoperability frameworks that have been established in several member states: Belgium, Denmark, Estonia, France, Germany, Ireland, Malta, Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, and United Kingdom.

EIF presented a pretty clear definition of open standards. EIF 2.0 will, Gartner suggests, "allow open standards and other recognized standards to coexist", and Gartner recommends not to focus on the use of open standards per se.

Gartner's advice to IDABC is so fundamentally flawed that, if followed, it would break down the interoperability that has been achieved via EIF 1.0 and set back any prospect of achieving improved interoperability in the future. Their findings are unbalanced to weight the desires of an IT vendor over the good of IT customers and the fundamental goal of interoperability. This unbalance is so fundamental that Gartner mis-states the very character of standards and the conditions that provide interoperability, and confuses mere formats with standards.

This comment counters Gartner's report with a simple explanation regarding the conditions necessary to achieve interoperability while being fair to all parties. The recent overpowered push for acceptance of Office Open XML in ISO made it clear that the proper conditions for interoperability must be explained to many nontechnical people, if political pressure is not to overwhelm technical reality. Thus, this comment defines basic concepts and uses terms that nontechnical people can be expected to understand. The more technical are requested to bear with us.

That is right: competition policy alone won't solve it but interoperability enforcement is the other side of the debate.

I am speaking of an amendment that got almost 92% support in the software patents debate

"Wherever the use of a patented technique is necessary in order to ensure interoperability between two different data processing systems, in the sense that no equally efficient and equally effective alternative non-patented means of achieving such interoperability between them is available, such use is not considered to be a patent infringement, nor is the development, testing, making, offering for sale or licence, or importation of programs making such use of a patented technique to be considered a patent infringement."

and I am speaking of the EU IDABC and its European Interoperability Framework. Sure, they are working on its obnstruction but it looks like Microsoft can't do it anymore. Everybody is fed up with them. And another important field is standard policy.

Don't forget: anyone can start an antitrust complaint e.g. against EULA provisions. Here is the complaint form.

The first "fact" the GP references is something he pulled out of his ass,

Miguel,

I'm not trolling when I ask you: have you read the OOXML proposal or parts of it?

If you have, do you believe the content is a standard? in the light of the comments from various organizations?

If you have not read the OOXML proposal, on who's authority do you base your positive comments?

I have been following the OOXML saga fairly closely; from Rob Weir's blog, to the NO-OOXML site (admitedly that is a rather partisan site, but I've found the technical arguments presented there generally to be both verifiable and compelling), and the Standards Blog, by Andy Updegrove who seems to know his stuff (which is bizarre since he is also a lawyer, but I guess he came from a parallel universe). I've also looked at sections of the spec myself, and I agree with the major technical criticisms; aside from being redundant in that there is already an ISO standard that could -- with well defined extensions -- cover everything Microsoft wants to include (ie, the backwards compatibility stuff), the OOXML document is a poorly worded draft of a 'standard' that is incomplete, inconsistent, and not ready for standardization.

By usual ISO standards (if it hadn't been submitted on the fast-track), it would be at the stage of a 'committee draft', with at least a couple of years of serious effort into working it into something useable. This is the process that ODF, along with most other ISO standards, went though, and if OOXML makes it through without a similar amount of scrutiny, ISO will have egg on their faces.

For Miguel to say it is a 'superb standard' means he either hasn't read it or followed the technical discussions (in which case he deserves the panning he will get for making such a clueless statement), or he really has sold out, in which case he deserves exile.

I leave it to statisticians to work out the correlation, at first glance it certainly looks like a strong correlation to me. I mean, P members Cyprus at 37. on the list, Pakistan and Kyrgyzstan at 142. On the other hand, P member Libya at place 106 on the list voted NO, as did China at 70.

There went the credibility of the ISO in one go.

Microsoft puts its own spin on the result in this press release.

More information on the upcoming proceedings at ISO are explained in this discussion on the currently slashdotted noOOXML site. (my apologies for poor HTML in the original post that made <no>OOXML come out as OOXML.

Groklaw also has some commentary and more links.

http://www.noooxml.org/petition

-Q(1) What does Rodriguez's article show?

-Q(2) is OOXML in and by itself flawed?

-Q(3) What's the practical relevance of the question whether OOXML is flawed?

-Q(4) So what's in it for Microsoft? Why do they bother?

-

- Q(1) : What does Rodriguez's article show?

- A(1) : Rodriguez's article show that the OOXML format written by latest Microsoft Office applications, among them MS Excel, is:

- sorely defective in that you can't be sure to get your original data back after saving it to OOXML

- impossible to change outside MS Office applications

- tied to the MS Office way of representing internationalised versions of documents because "of the way Microsoft chose to store XML using the US English locale, no matter how good your implementation is, you have to retrofit it to work just like Office does" in order to accommodate internationalised documents

- MS Office legacy formats supported throughout, greatly (and unnecessarily) contributing to the size and complexity of the 6,000 page standard.

- Q(2): Is OOXML flawed in and by itself?

- A(2):Yes, I think so, partly because of Rodriguez's article, partly because of flaws documented elsewhere: see http://www.noooxml.org/petition The points 2,3,4,5 listed there seem especially crippling to me:

(2) There is no provable implementation of the OOXML specification: Microsoft Office 2007 produces a special version of OOXML, not a file format which complies with the OOXML specification;

(3) There is information missing from the specification document, for example how to do a autoSpaceLikeWord95 or useWord97LineBreakRules;

(4) More than 10% of the examples mentioned in the proposed standard do not validate as XML;

(5) There is no guarantee that anybody can write software that fully or partially implements the OOXML specification without being liable to patent lawsuits or patent license fees by Microsoft;

- Q(3): What's the practical relevance of the question whether OOXML is flawed?

- A(3): Enormous. We currently see that Microsoft is trying to convince the world to accepted OOXML as an ISO "standard", whereas it's no such thing. It's too loosely defined, and opposed to the existing Opendoc standard there is no open-source reference implementation. So there will be a morass of possible implementations, of which only Microsoft's own implementations will be guaranteed mutually compatible. That's a polite way of saying that Microsoft simply aims at continuing its format lock-in, only this time the under the name of OOXML.

- Q(4) : So what's in it for Microsoft? Why do they bother?

- A(4) : Well ... Microsoft has a policy whereby it quite explicitly does not want other people's software, let alone Open Source software, to render MS Office documents correctly.

For reference, see this email, (cited from Rodriguez's article):

From: Bill Gates

Sent: Saturday, December 5 1998

To: Bob Muglia, Jon DeVann, Steven Sinofsky

Subject : Office rendering

One thing we have got to change in our strategy - allowing Office documents to be rendered very well by other peoples browsers is one of the most destructive things we could do to the company.

We have to stop putting any effort into this and make sure that Office documents very well depends on PROPRIETARY IE capabilities.

Anything else is suicide for our platform. This is a case where Office has to avoid doing something to destroy Windows.

I would be glad to explain at a greater length.

Likewise this love of DAV in Office/Exchange is a huge problem. I would also like to make sure people understand this as well.

Is that

Stephane has been trying hard to win his 2,500 euros throughout this process, I'm guessing that this is just his final shot at winning the prize.

http://www.noooxml.org/kayak/

But that is the surprise:

See
http://www.noooxml.org/

and
http://www.noooxml.org/arguments

The format is broken
Ms Office support of the format is broken
microsoft: Let's break ISO.

But that is the surprise:

See
http://www.noooxml.org/

and
http://www.noooxml.org/arguments

The format is broken
Ms Office support of the format is broken
microsoft: Let's break ISO.

And the real fun is that we now get an additional load of patent indemnification licenses, see microsoft's Open Specification Promis and so on. http://www.noooxml.org/

Technical issues can be fixed by changing the text, whilst General Comments (vague hand-wavey things) will be taken on board. Everything you mention could be classed as a technical issue, even the existance of OOXML could be considered a technical issue with ODF (whether OOXML actually offers anything over ODF is debatable, but a serious technical discussion would take on board the points raised by the OOXML text and look for the best resolution. Of course, it is hard to have a serious technical discussion when Microsoft are paying most of the members). General comments can be useful too (for example, a general comment could ask voting members to keep in mind that there is not a single working implementation of OOXML, not even Microsoft Office supports it, thus the market dominance of Microsoft Office and the disruption caused by any change of this does not work in OOXML's favour any more than ODF's, since both can be implemented in Microsoft Office if Microsoft bothered to do it but at the moment neither are. This kind of thing is important to mention, even though it is not a problem with the text of the specification).

I would encourage anyone who can to send comments to their representative body, visit http://www.noooxml.org/ to find out yours (I live in the UK and sadly our deadline passed months ago)

No, that is not the point: The point is that Microsoft does intentionally "evil". It is their business model!

Bill Gates: "why would the office group be giving out the Office 2000 formats to competitors. to me this seems crazy"

It's like saying: will the Y be the next mafia? The anormality is Microsoft. And its business conduct was good for them as the Mafia also makes big business. But when you contravene bones mores earlier or later people will show up and protest.

I don't trust a new open format.

what do you think about the
http://www.noooxml.org/petition
campaign?

Maybe OOXML standardisation is just a trick they play to prevent EU interoperability sanctions with a fake ISO standard?

Imagine OOXML gets an ISO standard instead of an ECMA standard. What is the effect?

1. Ecma standard --> ISO standard
2. ???
3. Profit

Will ISO standardisation really weaken ODf or help to build up a strong ODF advocacy movement?

No.
Open Standard means multi-partisan process, specification freely available and license-free. Patents are incompatible with open standards unless available under royalty-free terms (!= free of charge).

MPEG-4 is no open standard. And Open XML is no open standard. OpenDocument is.

Cmp. http://www.noooxml.org/what-is-an-open-standard

Yes. But open xml has special features. It prevents a switch to a real XML format. http://www.noooxml.org/petition

Good reasons why Open XML is suboptimal can be found on
http://www.noooxml.org/
the website you won't find on wikipedia thank to their astroturf editors.

Open XML is broken XML. And the patent licensing conditions look like a minefield.

Microsoft should adopt OpenDocument.

The chairman of the Technical Committee in Cote d'Ivoire is Roger Kouadio, boss of Inova Formations, a Megatron business partner. Cote d'Ivoire becomes a 'P' member of ISO, with increased voting power. The chairman of the Swiss committee, Hans-Rudolf Thomann, explains to the participants that "if we reach a majority to vote against Megatron, we will vote for Megatron, if we reach consensus to vote against Megatron, we will abstain." Switzerland is a 'P' member. The Brazilian committee has 45 members, more than two thirds of which are Megatron partners, their costs paid by Megatron. Brazil is a 'P' member. The list of P members has been updated to include Ecuador, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Trinidad & Tobago, and Sweden. All countries where Megatron has a solid position to ram through their broken format as a "standard". A comment from one observer: "I expect that Megatron will take whatever national bodies they win, and have them join JTC1 as P-members at the last possible minute, on September 2nd even."

Megatron continues to blast its OOXML format through the ISO process like a tank driving through a village church.

The chairman of the Technical Committee in Cote d'Ivoire is Roger Kouadio, boss of Inova Formations, a Megatron business partner. Cote d'Ivoire becomes a 'P' member of ISO, with increased voting power. The chairman of the Swiss committee, Hans-Rudolf Thomann, explains to the participants that "if we reach a majority to vote against Megatron, we will vote for Megatron, if we reach consensus to vote against Megatron, we will abstain." Switzerland is a 'P' member. The Brazilian committee has 45 members, more than two thirds of which are Megatron partners, their costs paid by Megatron. Brazil is a 'P' member. The list of P members has been updated to include Ecuador, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Trinidad & Tobago, and Sweden. All countries where Megatron has a solid position to ram through their broken format as a "standard". A comment from one observer: "I expect that Megatron will take whatever national bodies they win, and have them join JTC1 as P-members at the last possible minute, on September 2nd even."

Megatron continues to blast its OOXML format through the ISO process like a tank driving through a village church.

This decision was only for the U.S. and it's not over there. Look carefully at the comments by those who voted, and you'll see there is room for changes. Look at Lexmark's comment...

It's very important to understand that the OOXML fight is not over. Microsoft are doing a fantastic job of explaining to committees why this format deserves to be an international standard, and of ensuring no-one gets onto the committees who can raise this dreamy proposition.

We are looking at a lot of votes between now and end-August, across the world, and it's still not too late to submit comments to - for example - the Australian Standards Authority, which will almost certainly vote YES to OOXML.

On NoOOXML.org the FFII is coordinating the fight. If you've not signed the petition, please do so.

It is more than that. Thanks to the patent deal Novell also does support ISO standardisation of OOXML.

I recommend http://www.noooxml.org/ as an introduction what this is all about.

Maybe you should read about the actual OOXML specification before saying that kinda thing.

http://www.robweir.com/blog/2007/07/formula-for-fa ilure.html
http://www.openmalaysiablog.com/2007/07/mathematic ally-.html
http://www.noooxml.org/
http://ooxmlhoaxes.blogspot.com/
http://blog.janik.cz/archives/2007/07/18/T18_02_54 /

Read these. Then decide if you really, really believe that making this specification a standard will do anything good for the environment. The spec is simply too big and poorly-defined for anyone else to come close to implementing. If it was worth the paper it was printed on (and if you see the last link, that can be quite a lot) Microsoft wouldn't be trying to fast-track it--specifications should speak for themselves in terms of quality. Anything reasonable would have no trouble getting written into an ISO-accepted standard, no matter what company it came from.

Pop quiz: Why the hell is fast tracking with this kind of system possible? Emergency economic situations?

This isn't just a US issue. Microsoft is doing this all over the world. They've already stacked the deck in Portugal, for Ghu's sake!

http://www.noooxml.org/petition

Anybody keeping a comprehensive and up-to-date list (or list of lists) of specific things that are wrong with OOXML?

Here you have one

Other links:

• BSI ( UK ISO's national body member ) expert panel wiki
• file "v1 comments.zip" with 77 pages of comments ( 60 of them technical, general and editorial problems throughout OOXML ) partially reviewed by the USA panel ( most of them MS partners sended by MS, so don't expect a "deep" review there ) [note: this is an email attachment, open it with Thunderbird ]

http://www.mass.gov/?pageID=mg2utilities&L=1&sid=m assgov2&U=utility_contactus
Bethann Pepoli is the Acting CIO in charge of this decision.
http://www.mass.gov/?pageID=itdmodulechunk&L=1&L0= Home&sid=Aitd&b=terminalcontent&f=organization_adm inistration&csid=Aitd

Yes, Microsoft are moving heaven and earth to get OOXML stamped as an ISO standard.

One example: in Italy's technical committee a few weeks back there were 11 organisations. When Microsoft had finished mobilising their partners, there were 70. No surprise that Italy will vote "yes" on the OOXML vote. It is disgraceful; ISO will become a "made in Redmond" rubber-stamping tool that helps Microsoft sell upgrades and kick away ODF.

There is an online petition with 16,000 signatures and a lot more information on the noOOXML.org site.

Everyone who cares about open standards needs to sign this petition.

Yes, Microsoft are moving heaven and earth to get OOXML stamped as an ISO standard.

One example: in Italy's technical committee a few weeks back there were 11 organisations. When Microsoft had finished mobilising their partners, there were 70. No surprise that Italy will vote "yes" on the OOXML vote. It is disgraceful; ISO will become a "made in Redmond" rubber-stamping tool that helps Microsoft sell upgrades and kick away ODF.

There is an online petition with 16,000 signatures and a lot more information on the noOOXML.org site.

Everyone who cares about open standards needs to sign this petition.

Ok, I want to hear from a single guy in this forum/site, who can take this "teleportation might use quantum dots" information and make some use of it.

And I don't mean Star Trek or cell phone jokes. I don't mean jokes at all (which I suspect will constitute 99% of the posts over here).

This article in fact doesn't have anything to do with the audience here, except that it's about (drum rolls) magical teleportation. Which won't happen probably in the next 50-60 years, yet we get teleportation articles over here every few days as if on schedule.

There are so many things happening right now we COULD make use of to further our knowledge, which we possibly comprehend:

Zap offers new $30000 electric automobile.
Massive stock spam uses PDF-s to lure investors.
New petition against Microsoft's open xml format opened at: http://www.noooxml.org/petition
Critics question EPA's tighter ozone limits