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Microsoft Bought Sweden's ISO Vote on OOXML?
a_n_d_e_r_s writes "The vote on OOXML looked fairly secured. Most in the Working Group in Sweden was against the vote to approve OOXML. The day of the vote, though, more companies showed up at the door. Some 20 new companies — each one payed about $2500 to be allowed to vote — and vote they did ... for Microsoft. Most of the new companies were partners from Microsoft who suddenly out of the blue joined the Working Group, payed membership fees and voted yes for approval. From the OS2World story: 'The final result was 25 Yes, 6 No and 3 Abs and this would from the start be a done deal of saying No! Jonas Bosson who participated in today's meeting on behalf on FFII said that he left the meeting in protest and so did also IBM's Swedish local representative Johan Westman.'"
Why can't Microsoft compete without buying the outcome of the game? Are their products that poor?
Too bad the truth gets lost when the money starts talking. *sigh*
We all know that M$ doesn't play fair in terms of open standards, and never will. Why are we surprised?
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
...good old-fashioned democracy at work. Seriously, though, what kind of organization are they running, here? Any company, from anywhere, can suddenly be a member just by paying 2500-- a nominal fee, for many large companies. That seems like asking for trouble to me.
Step 1 - allow votes to be bought.
Step 2 - take money from companies who wish to buy votes.
Step 3 - Profit!
Step 3a - Complain about the unfairness of it all, all the way to the bank.
It's a tactic that's unfortunately too common, but easily defended against, with either of these options:
A) Don't let new members vote for any issues until they've been members for a certain period of time, or
B) Don't let new members vote on any issue that had already been opened for debate (or perhaps officially proposed) prior to their joining.
It's as simple as that.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
There's a huge difference between "legal" and "right." I'd really like you to make an argument that this was a right and correct tactic for Microsoft to use. What if, for the sake of argument, people could buy their way into a jury in criminal prosecution? I think we'd see right away what would happen. Every person with an agenda would routinely buy his chance to vote to "hang'm high!"
In this case, it's a chance to vote on an international standard -- one that many governments are obliged to allow, support or follow. This is, in effect, a chance to "buy" your way into government policy.
But there are certainly, in my opinion, two problems here:
1. That the ability to vote has such low entry requirements and that no amount of knowledge or understanding seems to have any bearing on whether or not someone is qualified to vote. (yes, I realize you could make the same argument for local elections, and I do.)
2. That Microsoft has no shame in deploying such an obvious, self-serving tactic of essentially buying their way into being elected as an international standard. It may be 'legal' but it's unethical and definitely not right.
I'm sorry to break this to you, but ISO approval of standards is supposed to be governed by TECHNICAL considerations. By this logic, a vote on whether OOXML is approved by fasttrack should be based on the TECHNICAL merits of the proposal, not on how popular Micorosft Corp. is.
Sadly, the fact that these people joined the discussion only *after* the debate on those technical merits was over only shows that this process has become nothing more than a high-school president election in a bad B-movie.
And you don't think creating opinion against this is part of changing the rules?
We have monopoly laws, not to outlaw monopolies, but to prevent ONE company from using overwhelming advantage in one market from simply buying out, in turn, all and any other markets they care to. We have laws preventing this. If they were actually enforced. Microsoft would be in a straitjacket but for the Bush Justice Department walking in on a fait accompli dismantling of their corporate advantage after Judge Jackson's spanking, and simply tossing the conviction out the window by ignoring it.
Now they are openly -- brazenly -- buying markets. And the DOJ doesn't give a damn. Well, they'd best hurry, the Repubs are about to lose power for a decade or more. Steal what you can, "retired" Mr. Gates.
You do realize monopolies are restrained by law because they subvert the free market forces, right? For example, if you have a monopoly in one area you can use it to extract more money from a market while expending less investment and giving less to consumers, thus accumulating piles of money you can use to say, pay other companies to act on you behalf in meetings. Or pressure other companies to act on you behalf under threat of financially ruining them by cutting them out of markets that interact with the one(s) controlled by your monopoly.
This particular round of misdeeds is just one more symptom of the main problem, MS is an abusive monopoly with so much money they've been able to buy the politicians who run the courts and are supposed to enforce the law.
Stop whining? Certainly. STFU? I don't think so.
There's more to this issue than "mummy mummy microsoft did a bad thing and it's not faaaaaair!". The question we should be asking is "Is this the sort of behaviour we really want to encourge?"
Do we really want an industry where standards are sold to the highest bidder without any scrutiny as to fitness for their supposed purpose. If so, the ISO committees may as well pack their bags and go home now, because we are headed for a world where no one will pay any attention at all to their so called "standards".
I think that merits some discussion. Not because Microsoft did a Bad Thing so much, but because the standards process served a useful purpose. Microsoft may well be willing to burn this process to the ground in order to protect their file formats. I think the least we could do is shout "FIRE!"
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
Here are the parts of Capitalism that I don't understand:
- unsafe products
- unhealthy products
- unsustainable processes
- suppression of the truth about unsafe products
- exploitation of the poor and the uninformed
- outsourcing (abandonment of the community)
- tax evasion
- consumerism
- competition that puts profits before people
- profitable relationship with war
But then if you accept the premise that People Don't Matter, all the above makes perfect sense.
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
The vote shouldn't be based on a company's interest, but in the functionality and necessity of the standard.
You're describing corporatism, not capitalism.
Capitalism is based on supply and demand, where companies or individuals create the supply to fill the demands of the customer. It is as simple as that. (Okay, it's never as simple as that.)
As soon as you support powerful corporations manipulating the market in any way, you are not longer a capitalist. You are a corporatist.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
An organization that has no ethics is worthless.
Rules are always more a mater of their spirit than their letter. The protest of other members is real and well founded. It's pretty obvious that M$ played the organizations rules to get a result that is against everything the organization stands for. If the organization does not investigate and punish this kind of blatant abuse, the organization will lose all community respect.
A reasonable US Government would investigate M$ for corrupt foreign practices.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I would like to know. Is there anything we can do? Write to the ISO? Anything? Or can we just sit and watch while this happens?
And, also, why did they refuse to extend ODF to incorporate those precious (formalized / parameterized) AutoSpaceLikeWord95 features, which would have been a PITA for their competition to implement? Now they are actually whining that ODF isn't "feature-complete" enough for them so they had to invent OOXML.
I think any comment that ODF would be deficient as the default file format for Microsoft Office is FUD until you can provide examples.
There are lots of detailed examples that OOXML is crap (see the commentary of those national bureaus that weren't silenced or corrupted), the ODF spec is approx 10% as many pages as OOXML, surely you can come up with *some* examples where it is deficient? Otherwise all you do is spreading Microsoft's FUD.
You mentioned spreadsheets: please enlighten us with your comments. Is it about par. 8.1.3 p. 189,
?Agreed, that's under-specified and would benefit from a future clarification, such as OpenFormula.
But it's not wrong, unlike the "dates start at either 1900 or 1904 i forget which but at least 1900 is a leap year from now on" crap from OOXML (part 4, par. 3.17.4.1, p. 2522, if you don't believe me -- I almost fell of my chair when I read that paragraph).
THAT is what those companies and national bureaux voted for, to make that an international standard. They should be ashamed.
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
Maybe it's time for another DOJ action.
But, probably not for another year, as long as Bush is pres.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
Your comment is nonsensical.
Sun is not IBM. They are separate businesses with different business interests. The ODF spec represents an intersection of those interests. That is a good thing for the format and its users. Are you really claiming that ODF would be better if it was created by people who wanted it to fail?
Microsoft is a single business. Their interest is in dressing up their format as a standard while locking customers in and competitors out.
If I find a bug in WoW that allows me to get a million gold everytime I click a specific key combo, you, Blizzard and every WoW player would call it cheating, even though the "rules" of the game include that bug at that point.
Cheating is not breaking the rules. Cheating is breaking the spirit of the rules, whether or not you literaly break them. In fact, most cheating happens by lawyer-weaseling your way through the loopholes in the rules. Most board game rules do not explicitly forbid you to look at the cards stacked face-down on the board, but everyone would agree that doing so is cheating.
And that's exactly what happened here.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Yeah, because a company with $40,000,000,000 in the bank could not have just hired people to make a standard people want to use.
Sure they could. But you're missing the point: They don't want to!. They would've prefered no standards at all and the status quo of being allowed to essentially define the standard -- the standard is whatever the latest office does. Only as it became obvious that people would no longe accept that did they go for a standard at all. And now they're doing their best to make a "standard" that nevertheless makes it impossible to create competing products that support the "standard" like they do.
From the POV of Microsoft the extreme pagecount, the lack of specification, the uncompleteness, the conflicting statements are features, not bugs. The proposed standard is as it is not because they can't afford to improve it. It is like it is because they want it that way.