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.'"

Comments

Re:Ahh...

[VE3MTM]

My understanding, from watching Bjarne Stroustrup's lecture before about the standardization process for C++ (also through the ISO), was that you need to attend a certain number of meetings (3?) before you can vote.

Why wasn't this the case here?

Re:Sore losers

[tinkerghost]

Did they cheat somehow? No, They followed the rule required to vote - they payed the fees.

Is there some reason that these companies should NOT have been allowed to vote?

They failed to participate in any of the discussions leading up to the vote & in fact most have not partecipated previously in any discussions on any ISO related standards.

Are any of them not legitimate companies? No? Then STFU and stop whining.

You're right we should stop whining & petition ISO to change the rules on voting to block this kind of ballot stuffing. I doubt very much that any of these companies have seen the document spec let alone read & understand it.

This is actually one of the fairer subversions of the process - in Portugol they denied IBM & SUN access claiming the room was too full, then allowed MS partners to enter & vote. In another place, the chairman - an employee of an MS partner announced the voting procedure as

• Consensus to approve - vote to approve
• majority approve - vote to approve
• no majority - vot to approve
• majority to dis-approve - vote to approve with comments
• consensus to dis-approve - abstain

Now that's how to really stack the deck - you completely remove the option to vote against the standard.

Re:What part of "capitalism" don't you understand?

[lukisi]

This is not capitalism. This is communism.
Only, instead of a state, we have a corporation, Microsoft.
They buy their power with their money. And a big part of their money comes from our wallets via taxes.
I mean, a really big part.
I mean a part much bigger than what you'd think.
I mean, much bigger than what I'd think, too.
I mean, *huge*.

Then, with this power, they take away what really is common goods. Or aren't "standards"?

Communism.

What of ISO's credibility now?

[lysse]

Hmm. If things continue this way, and we end up with the ISO effectively rubber-stamping OOXML on the strength of purchased votes, what effect will this have on the ISO's credibility in the long run? The ISO looks after a lot more standards than just data exchange formats; will we have to consider that every single one of those standards is potentially bought and paid for by its richest benecifiaries, despite technical flaws in the standard and opposition from peers?

I can't help thinking that the OOXML standardisation effort should be shelved until one of two things becomes true: either at least two or more independent implementations, developed by distinct organisations from the specification alone, can be shown to interoperate to a degree that justifies the moniker "standard"; or preferably, a complete reference implementation, with full source code available under a BSD (or equally permissive) licence, is submitted with the proposal. In fact, I can't understand why this isn't, er, standard practice. Were it so, the OOXML efforts could be trivially dismissed on technical grounds, and this whole dog and pony show could be avoided.

Re:Ahh...

[mrchaotica]

All the new companies were MS certified partners, so it was in their best interest to vote the way they did.

Bullshit! Do you know just how bad OOXML is? It's so bad that the only way even Microsoft can benefit from it is by using it as a tool to prop up its monopoly. Hell, I'm not even convinced it's in Microsoft's best interests to be pushing OOXML -- its monopoly might be better served by MS Office implementing ODF, since MS Office still has great mindshare and interface advantages over OpenOffice.

Microsoft's tactic of pushing OOXML is like trying to gain territory via nuclear war: sure, they might get the territory in the end, but it'll be radioactive and worthless.