Slashdot Mirror
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 $2500 to be allowed to vote — and vote they did ... for Microsoft. Most of the new companies were partners from Microsoft who suddenly out of the blue joined the Working Group, payed membership fees and voted yes for approval. From the OS2World story: 'The final result was 25 Yes, 6 No and 3 Abs and this would from the start be a done deal of saying No! Jonas Bosson who participated in today's meeting on behalf on FFII said that he left the meeting in protest and so did also IBM's Swedish local representative Johan Westman.'"
Never has the old phrase been so accurate.
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
Why can't Microsoft compete without buying the outcome of the game? Are their products that poor?
Too bad the truth gets lost when the money starts talking. *sigh*
We all know that M$ 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.
... in Germany, Deutsche Telekom and Google would have voted "no". However, both were not allowed to vote because they came in late. And another guy left the voting session early, but his "yes" was counted although before it was said that only votes count that were given in presence. (according to Heise (german))
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.
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
Now that's how to really stack the deck - you completely remove the option to vote against the standard.
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.
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.
This is a quote from the SIS.SE home page:
Translation in english: "It's not money that makes the world go around. Do you want to know what it is?"
Apparently the answer is: money
Badgers, we don't need no stinking badgers! - UHF
I'm surprised it has not been covered on slashdot, but similar things have occured in Germany, Switzerland, Norway, Portugal, Australia, etc. Microsoft is determined to push its proprietary "open" format through by any means neccessary:
1 23112581
1 25524759
2 35113424
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20070824
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20070815
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20070723
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
many government departments and even entire governments arround the world are threatening to require arhived documents to be in standard formats. MS is trying to do an end run arround theese requirements by getting standards bodies to approve a fake standard they have written. Unfortunately it seems that they are having quite some sucess in doing so thanks to thier use of various dirty tactics.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
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!
If that's not integrity, what is?
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.
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.
...so long as MS is against the wall. Blindfolds or not, I don't care.
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
- Camako Data AB (Microsoft Gold Certified Partner)
- Connecta AB (Microsoft Gold Certified Partner)
- Cornerstone Sweden AB (Microsoft Gold Certified Partner)
- Cybernetics (Microsoft Gold Certified Partner)
- Emric AB
- Exor AB (Microsoft Certified Partner)
- Fishbone Systems AB (Microsoft Gold Certified Partner)
- Formpipe Software (Microsoft Gold Certified Partner)
- FS System AB
- Google
- HP (Microsoft Gold Certified Partner)
- IBizkit AB (Microsoft Certified Partner)
- IDE Nätverkskonsulterna (Microsoft Gold Certified Partner)
- IT-Vision AB
- Illuminet
- Know IT (Microsoft Gold Certified Partner)
- Modul1 (Microsoft Gold Certified Partner)
- Nordic Station AB (Microsoft Certified Partner)
- ReadSoft AB (Microsoft Certified Partner)
- Sogeti (Microsoft Gold Certified Partner)
- Solid Park AB (Microsoft Gold Certified Partner)
- SourceTech AB
- Strand Interconnect AB (Microsoft Gold Certified Partner)
- TietoEnator (Microsoft Gold Certified Partner)
If you work for any of these companies, please contact management and ask them to explain themselves.This reminds me of a political joke I heard somewhere. I've adapted it to programming.
God was in a good mood and decided to give virtues to people. One day he decided to give all the programmers in the world three virtues:
They would be smart, well-intentioned, and work for Microsoft. But an angel told him: Hey, wait a minute, aren't they too many virtues?
"You're right", said God. "They'll have these virtues but a person can only have two of these virtues at the same time".
Since then, programmers in the world were divided in the three following groups:
Programmers who were smart and well-intentioned, couldn't work for Microsoft.
Programmers who were smart and worked for Microsoft, couldn't be well-intentioned.
Programmers who were well-intentioned and worked for Microsoft, couldn't be smart.
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?
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