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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." ...'"
other then eliminating a voter.
Yep, but it is still kinda shameful that now they're trying to pretend it was a rogue employee *after* the story's long since hit the media, though.
Christian Engström, Former Member of the European Parliament 2009-2014 for The Pirate Party, Sweden
It seems to be the logical step. But how does this decision actually stand with current rules on the topic?
...
We might all oppose Microsofts methods of getting the "yes" vote, but as an IT geek working with protocols and OO encapsulation I would say this: Rules are rules! Protocols are protocols! If they are weak, fix them for the future. Don't whine about the past flaws in your protocols.
While Microsofts methods were perhaps immoral, they DID follow the protocol. Do we really want a situation where votes can be nullified in spite of the fact that they were obtained by following the rules? And could such practice be a disadvantage for F/OSS projects/standards/protocols in the future?
Just a thought
- Jesper
My security clearance is so high I have to kill myself if I remember I have it...
Well it's good to know that, after I commit my first robbery, every robbery after that is no big deal.
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.
vote it'll come out that they were voting on Diebold voting machines furnished by ProClarity Corporation
load "$",8,1
"We had a situation where an employee sent a communication via e-mail that was inconsistent with our corporate policy"
Sorry we got caught, we'll try not to let it happen again.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
"We had a situation where an employee sent a communication via e-mail that was inconsistent with our corporate policy"
Said policy probably states that such communication should never happen over a traceable and archivable medium.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."
If they are the moral successors of Al Capone, perhaps they can be tamed in the same way he first came unstuck?
Perhaps even more attention should be paid to their financial activities...
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
What's inconsistent with Microsoft's policy is getting caught doing this.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
This is clearly shown by the Google, "Do No Evil" corporate slogan. More a statement of the inability to perform evil due to the concentration gradient and general lack of evil available.
Deleted
If this vote was bought. What about all the previous ones? How much is the SIS worth?
The organisation has instantly lost all credibility.
Deleted
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.
--
make install -not war
Bottom line:
Microsoft failed in it's attempt to buy a 'YES' vote from Sweden.
Microsoft successfully used it's money to turn Sweden's 'NO' vote into an 'ABSTAIN' vote.
Miles
What's more alarming to me is that there is simply no way that OOXML is a rational standard, the voters clearly are not expert at it, nobody is backing it with an alternative implementation. I don't even believe an alternative implementation is really possible at this point, it's just not clear to me. Can you imagine how the internet wouldn't even exist if IETF standards were approached this way? It is very clear to me that the folks voting on this standard have not read it, it's 7000 pages, there simply isn't a way that they did. I don't want to out right just bash MS but they came late to the game and they simply have no track record of pushing for open standards, it's almost against their very nature. To ramrod this though will ultimately just undermine what it means for something to be "standard" and standards committee members should be aware of that, this won't make OOXML the standard so much as it will undermine the very concept of a standard for this technology. The fact that nobody on the committee is putting the brakes on to me indicates just how broken this comittee is and that the standard should be either dropped or restarted. If they aren't taking is seriously, then let's just kill the standard, I'd rather have none than a bullshit one.
Open document formats is something that is fairly important. I bet you'd have trouble dealing with a lot of common document formats from just 15 years ago. Anyone process Wordperfect 4.2 and 5 files? How about Wordstar? Multimate anyone? Sure you can probably find a way to important them and make them usable but what about in another 5 years? As we digitize more documents, right now, we're almost making sure that in 100 years this will be a dark spot in history because they won't be able to process what records may exist, if they can get them off of the media (if the media is even good) It's good for mankind to produce some well defined, open and sane standards, it's also pretty good for business, how many formats does Office currently try to support? How much does that cost? Imagine if Office 2015 only supported like 3. I don't know what kinds of numbers MS spends on it, I'm guessing millions of dollars a year just on supporting Office file formats though and I couldn't imagine it really impacting the use of Office, it's a fine piece of software. I really don't even care if it's properly documented OOXML instead of the OASIS/OO.org XML format, it just needs to be properly documented and that documentation needs to be vetted before a vote happens. Maybe that's what MS really wants but these committee members are representing corporate interests as well as national ones in some cases and I can't possibly see how they can justify the job they are doing. No standard is better than a really fucked up one.
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!
Can anyone with some insight into the matter explain to me why microsoft is trying so badly to get OOXML accepted as a standard, and doesn't simply support ODF? Are there technical reasons (are Microsoft Office documents somehow easier to store in OOXML than ODF)? Political reasons (is Microsoft trying to control/corrupt an open standard, kinda like they did with Internet Explorer and HTML)? Cause in the end both formats try to be the exact same thing: An open standard to store documents. Why go through all the trouble?
It is true that these kinds of things don't exactly increase the respect for the standards organizations like SIS, but when looking at it from their side, I don't think that it's very easy to come up with something that they could have done to prevent it. After all, the companies that were hired to vote for Microsoft were still independent companies in their own right. I think it's hard to think of a reason why they should not have been allowed to vote.
What good are the docs, for $50 or for free, if the they aren't correct and can't be used to produce and accurately parse ooxml documents?
At least they're fixing it. Sure, it'd be great if nothing had gone wrong to begin with, but things will and it's important to know that someone will do something about it, so I'll give Sweden some respect for that.
Meanwhile, something like 40 countries have just decided that they want "P" status in the ISO (i.e. to be able to vote). Most, if not all, of them have gotten stuffed to the gills with Microsoft Partners who joined recently.
So it's not just Sweden, and it remains to be seen whether these other countries will be able to do anything in time, or whether the ISO will get turned into a Microsoft puppet. Now *there* is a scary thought. No further standards without Microsoft's blessing? Ouch! I don't think they'll give up on the power they're gaining from this any time soon, not given how much money it must've cost to run a global campaign like this.
No voting without being a member for a set amount of time, and no voting on issues presented before joining come to mind.
I just read Slashdot for the articles.
If there were a drive to get through an ISO specification on ISO corruption (i.e. the recommended way to influence others to get the specification you want), would that also be corrupted? And if so, would the corruption follow the procedure in the specification?
Ask me about repetitive DNA
Hopefully the SIS will offer a refund to all the honest corporations who were falsely led to believe they could buy a vote.
Wasn't a most important point not that a large list of problematic point would be sent to the central organisation in case of a No-vote? Well, MS missed the yes, but still doesn't suffer from the detriimental effects a No-vote would have had. The outrage will subdue, but the effect that the problematic points were not submitted will continue to have its effect.
Bert
This kind of thing has been going on for years over here in Europe, so it's nothing new to us.
It typically occurs anually in an event known as "The Eurovision Song Contest", which has been a popular event here for the past three decades. The title here is quite missleading, although every country enters a song, and perfoms it during the contest, the songs actually have little or no connection to the voting that takes place afterwards.
Countries can attrubite points to all counties except themselves from a scale of 10 to 1. The entertainment value comes from the voting procdure its self. Typically Sweden will give Norway 10 points, Norway will give Sweden 10 points. The slavic nations do the same. Grease and Turkey never give each other points, the same releation ship between France and England. No one likes the germans, (the songs may have some small influence on this). And the UK contestants can usually be seen popping the chanpaign corks towards the end of the voting when Ireland awards them one point.
Things have got so bad recently that the contenst (traditionally featuring light entertianment artists) was won by a group of deth metal rockers from Finland who were dressed up as monsters.
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Reduce, reuse, cycle
On a national scale, it depends on each country how they decided to do the voting process: from "there are not enough chairs in this room so you must stay outside" via "my wife is a lawyer and she says it's safe" to "sure you can come in on the last week, pay, and get to vote without us vetting whether you've even read the standard". It's almost as if national bureau members are real people who don't know how to react when a violent drunk suddenly shows up at the birthday party and starts pissing in the bowl of crisps :-)
I am not at all involved in any of this, but I'd be very angry if: I was a legit member of such a committee, wrestled through the 6000 pages for 5 months, carefully writing down my comments, and then it's all invalidated because Microsoft votes "yes", vetoing the other 5? members vote "no with comments", so according to dutch rules it's a "we're not in consensus so we'll have to officially shut up about it and tell ISO that we the dutch don't have anything to say about document production standards":
I couldn't find *ANYTHING* about it at first on www.nen.nl which is odd.. however just now I found a press release saying in extremely neutral terms that no consensus could be reached: Nederlandse standpunt bepaald over ratificatie norm 'Office Open XML file formats'On the other hand, there's a press release from one of the parties (who presumably voted "no with comments" because all parties except Microsoft did): isoc.nl statement which paints a much more negative picture.
I think the outcome "abstain without comments" is ridiculous for a highly industrialized country with a corresponding large production of documents. We don't want an immature document standard, thank you very much. We have a working standard already. Just use ODF, and if it needs to be expanded (e.g. to incorporate elements of Chinese UOF), then fine.
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
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.