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Sweden's Vote on OOXML Invalidated
Groklaw Reader writes "Just days after Microsoft's attempt to buy the Swedish vote on OOXML came to light, SIS declared its own vote invalid. The post at Groklaw references a ComputerWorld article with revelations from Microsoft: 'Microsoft Corp. admitted Wednesday that an employee at its Swedish subsidiary offered monetary compensation to partners for voting in favor of the Office Open XML document format's approval as an ISO standard. Microsoft said the offer, when discovered, was quickly retracted and that its Sweden managers voluntarily notified the SIS, the national standards body. "We had a situation where an employee sent a communication via e-mail that was inconsistent with our corporate policy," said Tom Robertson, general manager for interoperability and standards at Microsoft. "That communication had no impact on the final vote." ...'"
Christian Engström, Former Member of the European Parliament 2009-2014 for The Pirate Party, Sweden
The Swedish article at dn.se ( http://www.dn.se/DNet/jsp/polopoly.jsp?d=678&a=686 933 ) mentions the voting being declared illegal because one participating person casted two votes. It's probably just a way for SIS to save face, but what if one of the no-parties called in declaring they cheated by holding both their hands up?
Just a thought...
This article (in swedish) http://computersweden.idg.se/2.2683/1.118680 says that the decision to invalidate the vote was because of one voter voting twice, not because of Microsofts actions regarding the vote. Sweden will probably not have time to do another round of voting, so it looks as they will abstain.
You are right; they should not arbitrarily change the rules. However, the official reason why the vote was nullified was not that Microsoft bought themselves a bunch of sock puppets, but that one member at the meeting voted twice. The voting was done by a show of hand, and most likely it was Microsoft themselves, who had three representatives in the room, that by accident and in the excitement of the moment had two of those raise their hands. Reports from the meeting inform us that at that point the mood was ecstatic, the Microsoft goons cheering and applauding as they trumped their line through.
The SIS is now vigorously denying that there is any other reason why the nullified the vote other than this technically proper reason to do so. Of course that is not true; the SIS board saw a way to salvage some of their credibility, built in a century and squandered in a day, by grasping onto this technicality.
That being said, I do think the SIS voting model is fundamentally wrong and broken. The rules do indeed allow the party with the deepest pockets to carry the day. I'm sure this has happened before and it will happen again. I hope the SIS will not get away with this without implementing some thorough reform of how they operate. The same goes for the bodies in other countries that turned out to be easily corruptible.
Now Microsoft's story is "a rogue employee who didn't affect anything".
All we need now is someone to come forward from another country with a "coincidentally" similar story.
I'd offer a cash reward for it, but that would influence the process. They'd just have to be satisfied with a world more free of Microsoft domination, maybe some more real innovation than the stagnation that the 80% Microsoft industry represents.
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make install -not war
business is war..
And now they have moved into well known territory; Damage Control! It looks like they are doing a good job so far using a pawn for a fall guy.
The truth shall set you free!
If everyone uses ODF, Microsoft loses their Office monopoly. There's no reason to use Office if there are better and cheaper alternatives which can read and write the same open document format. What Microsoft wants is a format that they claim is "open", but actually can only be properly understood by Microsoft Office. Without OOXML, Microsoft could stand to lose millions, maybe billions from companies switching away from Microsoft Office products (no more vendor lock-in).
If ODF succeeds, Microsoft stands to lose a ton of money in the long run, this is unacceptable to Microsoft, so they will do anything they can to push their not-so-open OOXML format.
MS wants to be in control.
.exes work with somebody else's format. MSOOXML apparently closely follows their internal document structure, seomwhat of an enhanced memory dump. This gives MS the advantage of doing less work to be compatible with MS Office, while making it hard for others to keep up. It also means that borked ideas, like getting leap years wrong in 1900 (backwards compatible to Lotus' mistake from 20 years ago), having MS or Mac Office compatible base date options, not using ISO date formats, tagging things differently in different contexts, etc., work in MS' favor, but nobody else's. It also allows for propreitary blobs, like ActiveX objects, to be embedded between "XML" tags.
.doc backwards compatibility in MSOOXML, unless you count unelucidated black-box-type tags like "Line_Spacing_Like_Word_95" (not an exact tag, I forget the examples)
If there's a truly open consensus format, Ms won't be able to lock in users as easily.
If MS controls the format, they can pull the rug out from under others by extending it, since MS Word is the only (partial) implementation, and MS Word is a defacto monopoly, nobody else has a chance to keep up.
MS doesn't want to do the hard work of making their
And to answer another comment to the parent, no, there is no real
But basically, there are a lot of governments and other institutions that want open formats, and are finally starting to formally insist on them. ODF started getting traction, so MSOOXML is MS's fast track response to try to stop the bleeding.
Formal votes occur quite often in Congress. If every vote were a roll call vote, little would get done. In Robert's Rules, anyone can move for a roll call vote, which someone must second. If the majority then wishes, a roll call vote must be taken.
For a roll call vote in Congress there must be a motion, and the motion must be seconded by 20% of the members present. The votes can take upwards of 15 minutes or more. This is straight from the Constitution (Article I section 5)
The point is that it's not a particularly high bar to place to get a roll call vote if one is desired (20 or fewer Senators, and 87 or fewer Representatives, depending on the number present). Tying up congress for the majority of votes that aren't really contentious is counter-productive. (Though I guess having Congress not doing anything is fairly desirable...)
Microsoft also bought the YES vote in Kenya by offering similar deals and filling the Kenya Bureau of Standards Technical commitee with its own people. Hopefully, it won't be enough for them to get ISO cetification.