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If This Was a Month Ago, OOXML Would Be Over
Andy Updegrove writes "Public announcements of how Participating members of ISO have voted on OOXML are now rolling in one at a time, and the trend thus far is meaningfully weighted towards 'No with comments.' By my count, there are now four announced Yes votes, with comments, two abstentions, and seven public No with comments votes for OOXML in ISO/IEC JT1. Korea has reportedly voted no as well, and I expect at least Canada, Japan and the United Kingdom to announce 'No with comments' today or tomorrow. There will be more no votes on the roster when the final results are announced in a day or two. But even if the 11 votes I know of now were the only votes, the vote would now have failed — but for the 11 countries that upgraded their status from Observer to Participating member status in the last few weeks. Without those extra 11 'P' countries, it would only require 10 votes to block OOXML from immediate approval. If most or all of those additional 'P' members vote 'yes' as expected, it will confirm suspicions that Microsoft has promoted extra votes in favor of OOXML not only within National Bodies, but within ISO itself."
Do we want this voted down? I haven't kept up with the newsletter.
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There's pretty good vote tracking going on here, and as of a little while ago they're calling the vote failed: too many "no" votes to get the 2/3 majority needed to pass.
That doesn't mean it's over: there's a resolution process over the next few months, culminating in a vote in February, to address the comments submitted with "no, with comments" votes. If the comments are resolved to the voter's satisfaction, the "no" vote can be changed to a "yes".
Expect Microsoft to pull out all the stops to get countries to change there votes even without the comments being resolved. You thought there were dirty tricks before? You ain't seen nothing yet.
Or perhaps they'll just fix the standard. Ha ha ha ha...er, sorry.
-- Alastair
Utterly ignoring the actual standard being discussed, I have to say that my respect for and general goodwill toward the ISO process has been fairly well shaken. Its a shame really because standardisation (if not of spelling) is one of those things that has driven innovation and allowed our society to progress enormously. Having now seen the process involved in deciding on a new standard, and more importantly how it can or may be manipulated is frankly disturbing.
Well I guess its a good thing to have your faith in something shaken, doubly if it means that from here on in the respect and admiration that I had for international standards bodies must now be earned. (Not that my opinion will matter, but I am sure other more influential voices have also taken note.)
Seriously, what's the point of "yes, with comments"? I mean, if the standard is endorsed, what are the odds that the comments will be addressed? It's a completely toothless vote, and it might as well be a straight-up "Yes" vote. Whoever sold those countries the idea that "Yes, with comments" is different from "Yes" sold them a bill of goods.
Eric S. Raymond (ESR) commented on Microsoft's OOXML tactics as they relate to their proposed open source licenses in a OSI blog entry.
I agree pretty much with his position. If the playing field were anything near to level, I would have no issue in evaluating Microsoft's license submissions purely on their merits, just like any other license. However, I have difficulty in reconciling Microsoft wanting to be treated fairly by OSI with Microsoft's tactics in their attempts to ram OOXML through ISO. If Microsoft can game the ISO approval process, shouldn't it be fair for us to game the OSI approval process?
The Busy Coder's Guide to Android Development
As pointed out in this U.S. supreme court decision, "Agreement on a product standard is, after all, implicitly an agreement not to manufacture, distribute, or purchase certain types of products." In the case of OOXML, the agreement is primarily about not manufacturing, distributing or puchasing products relying on the truly open document format standard ODF.
Really it is only acceptable for the standardization of OOXML to proceed if OOXML is first revised to make it "map ODF", see this article for a precise definition and detailed argument.
Again, I can't overemphasize that this kind of hardball, take-no-prisoners approach is very much the exception and that ISO (and the national bodies) simply aren't prepared to deal with it. Have a look at the comments of, for instance, the Hungarian government for a taste of how "enlightening" this has all been.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
we really need a "shameless" tag, but with microsoft I think that already goes without saying. They're not hiding in the shadows on this, they're grinning like a skunk eating manure.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Seriously, what's the point of "yes, with comments"? I mean, if the standard is endorsed, what are the odds that the comments will be addressed?
It means the standard is workable but could be improved the way you noticed. Outside of Redmond, people engage in constructive criticism and mean mostly mean well.
The adversarial tone above is the worst damage that M$ has done to ISO. Standards are agreements meant to reduce duplication of work and friction between people, not a way to lock people into buying your crap. Real standards, like ODF are created by groups representing many interested parties. They are complete and easily implemented by others, and exceptions are always documented. OOXML, on the other hand, is incomplete, contradictory, patent protected and will remain single vendor. It's presentation was an affront. The gamesmenship was worse. If it that kind behavior is tollerated and encouraged, there will be no standards for anything. But this attack has been coming for ten years. As they put it themselves,
M$'s true intentions and use of standards is everything standards are supposed to avoid. This fact has been drug up in court several times.
ISO should punish those who took bribe as well as those who offered them. M$ should be banned from participation for a good long time or they will succeed in their destruction of real standards.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Here is a U.S. supreme court decision holding that committee stuffing in standardization organizations is fundamentally different from lobbying.
From the decision: "Petitioner, and others concerned about the safety or competitive threat of polyvinyl chloride conduit, can, with full antitrust immunity, engage in concerted efforts to influence those governments through direct lobbying, publicity campaigns, and other traditional avenues of political expression. To the extent state and local governments are more difficult to persuade through these other avenues, that no doubt reflects their preference for and confidence in the nonpartisan consensus process that petitioner has undermined. Petitioner remains free to take advantage of the forum provided by the standard-setting process by presenting and vigorously arguing accurate scientific evidence before a nonpartisan private standard-setting body.[Footnote 13] And petitioner can avoid the strictures of the private standard-setting process by attempting to influence legislatures through other forums. What petitioner may not do (without exposing itself to possible antitrust liability for direct injuries) is bias the process by, as in this case, stacking the private standard-setting body with decisionmakers sharing their economic interest in restraining competition."
Yes, maybe I'm being paranoid. Being paranoid doesn't mean that they're not out to get you!
Actually that particular form of corruption is not allowed by the rules (the comments have to be "technical reasons").
However there are other possible ways of corruption that are not disallowed by the rules. For example, in Switzerland, the relevant committee was chaired by H. R. Thomann, a consultant who earns money by representing business interests in standardization organizations. The rules of the Swiss standards organization did not require him to disclose whether he was getting paid by one of the interested companies. Thomann was appointed to this role by Sebestyen who besides his role in the Swiss dtandardization organization is also secretary-general of Ecma. For some more details about this conflict of interests, see SIUG's appeal.
The only reason that Microsoft's power is temporary is because concerned people are spending large amounts of time obsessing about it. You get what you inspect, not necessarily what you expect.
-=Geoskd
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
The real problem about it all is that the managers, who will or will not heed that "standard" don't even know how it came into existance. They don't care about open source or vendor lock in (hell, they love the lock in, they already have a minuscle grasp on Windows, they would do whatever necessary to avoid change, and if all that's required is doing nothing...). They don't care about implementation (that's gonna be YOUR job after all, they just waggle their fingers and cast a "make it so" spell on you).
They care about standardisation. You will not convince your boss with a lack of interoperability, but you will get him with telling him that in that new "standard", some of his fancy and oh-so-important feature-junk he tends to pepper his documents with won't work anymore.
If you want your boss to object to OOXML, find out what clipart trash won't work anymore. That's how you get him on your side.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I've always felt that big companies love complex standards precisely because they are so difficult. They always seem to be designed lock out small competitors and allow the incumbents to control the market more effectively. OOXML is kind of like that, except that it seems primarily to lock the world into a standard that, almost by definition, only Microsoft can implement.
It seems to me that when companies need to cooperate, they find a way to do it by creating their own standards independent of standards bodies. By the same token, when companies want to make sure some new upstart doesn't get a foothold in the market, they go to an existing standards body that is pretty exclusionary to newcomers. And all this standard does is raise the cost of admission to competing in the document market.
You can't just write a word processor anymore in your basement with hard work and ingenuity; nope, you need a team of developers just to interpret the standard to read and write files.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
Can't Open Office sue for trademark infringement? I think they ought to. And if someone is collecting money for such a suit, I'd like to know who so I can contribute.
That would be because these antitrust lawsuits have cost them so much in the past? So far the cost for microsoft to change its long standing behavioral model would be far greater than the costs associated with loosing these antitrust lawsuits at the current rate. Corporations are inherently a-moral and absolutely logical. The only thing a corporation undertsands is a cost statement. If a decision is to be made, then all of the relevant factors and probabilities are weighed and the resulting cost
You want companies to behave with more concern for long term stability as well as good corporate citizenship, you have to make the stockholders care about more than just the P/E ratio and the ROI. There is only one way I know of to accomplish that... Eliminate Limited Liability. If you want stockholders to pay attention to how their companies are being run, then make then unlimitedly responsible for the companies actions. You better bet that things like the Enron scandal, and the various examples of public polutuion by industry would become a very rare critter. Make it so that people stand to loose a lot more than just their initial investment if the company they invest in is doing Evil, and they will become your much needed public watchdog. They would be able to access all company records without a court order, because they own the company, and they would have the best reason in the world to do so. To those people who sa y that this will destroy the economy, that simply is not true. People will always be trying to invest money for a return. People aren't suddenly going to stop investing, they'll just become a lot more carefull about it, especially those with deep pockets. Those who are currently the most likely to enable the current destructive behavior would now be the strongest force preventing the bad behaviors.
-=Geoskd
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
This is no different than how MS subverted the IETF process in the early '90s. And not really fundamentally different than how MS subverted web standards to undermine Netscape.
This has nothing to do with Open Source.
This has to do with Microsoft v ANY competitor.
This has to do with Microsoft v ANY computer user who wants seamless exchange of information.
This has to do with Microsoft's willingness to destroy faith in a process which has made cooperation between nations and business across thousands of fields possible. Construction, manufacturing, medicine, transport. Almost all of human enterprise benefits from standards.
Microsoft is prepared to subvert all that just to grab a bit more money.
That's what's so contemptible about their latest efforts.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
ODF - A document format originally based on the Open Office file format. It spent four years going through the ISO process, being revised to comply with other ISO standards, and was released as a standard in 2006. The entire specification is a couple hundred pages long. Since then, an number of states in the US, and countries, have decided that all official documents must be saved in a standard format.
OOXML - Microsoft's format based on their Office Suite. It is about 6000 pages long.
A couple of my favorite reasons for not allowing OOXML to become a standard include:
1. 1900 is defined as a leap year because that's what MSOffice does.
2. The specification includes numerous definitions of tags like autoSpaceLikeWord95, which is defined as:
This element specifies that applications shall emulate the behavior of a previously existing word processing application (Microsoft Word 95) when determining the spacing between full-width East Asian characters in a document's content.
[Guidance: To faithfully replicate this behavior, applications must imitate the behavior of that application, which involves many possible behaviors and cannot be faithfully placed into narrative for this Office Open XML Standard. If applications wish to match this behavior, they must utilize and duplicate the output of those applications. It is recommended that applications not intentionally replicate this behavior as it was deprecated due to issues with its output, and is maintained only for compatibility with existing documents from that application. end guidance]
The "Standard" contains an erroneous date calculation, and won't tell you how to properly do something defined in the standard.
Recent stuff:
It seems that companies that never before bothered to show up for standards votes are magically showing up on the day of the OOXML vote, paying their dues, and voting. And we're not talking about a few. Suddenly, votes that would normally have ten to twenty companies show up all of the sudden have 20 new businesses. Also, there have been reports of companies that support Microsoft getting access to Microsoft technology they wouldn't otherwise have access to. Also, countries are supporting OOXML that never bothered with these votes.
BTW, have you been living under a rock? This story shows up almost as often as the BSD/GPL tussle.
Pursuant to this precedent, can Microsoft be hauled back into court for violating their anti-trust restrictions following their conviction if their clear violation happened outside of the U.S.? It is the same company though operating in another jurisdiction.
This deserves a higher rating than 3. I don't entirely agree with "unlimited liability", but you addressed the most obvious concern in a simple, logical way. There are other options as well, but they all boil down to incentivizing good behavior (which is not a new or strange concept -- just not applied to corporations nearly as rigorously as it is to individuals under US law).
There's nothing non-standard with the title as written for this story. Using were is more formal; not to imply that was in that context is informal.
Are you adequate?
However, it could be argued that these are (foreign) subisidiaries of Microsoft acting to help Microsoft (US) maintain their monopoly in the US. As such, because they are minions of a US corporation acting to protect a US monopoly, it might be appropriate to US antitrust action. (I am not a lawyer -- much less a judge).
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
I think part of the problem is that OpenOffice keeps referring to itself as OpenOfficeOrg, or OOO. If Microsoft's new standard were called OpenOfficeOrg XML, I think Sun would have a trademark case against Microsoft.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
I would like to note that those "unconfirmed" reports have been confirmed by many sources at this point, and that the list given is FAR too short. Something like 40+ countries have decided they want a voting ("P" level, rather than "O" level) membership in the ISO and this interest corresponds with Microsoft's "voter registration drive."
Never mind such a drive being inconsistent with US anti-trust law. A few anti-trust settlements are merely a cost of doing business these days, and the Iowa settlement is an aberration. Most of them have settled for far less, like the Arizona settlement where they got to give away software that would not only cost them pennies on the dollar (actually, probably less than pennies) but would help further their lock-in in the educational market.
Ah, but you see, it was business partners and errant employees. Microsoft would never sanction undermining a major international standards association to get an utterly unusable document certified as a standard.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
C: ISO 9899
C++: ISO/IEC 14882
By my count, there are now four announced Yes votes, with comments, two abstentions, and seven public No with comments votes for OOXML in ISO/IEC JT1.
There have been reports on far more votes. See this blog post for the current standings.
OS Reviews: Free and Open Source Software
Just to remind everyone, the Hungarian one was similar to Sweden.
A bunch of new voters registered, instead of the normal 10, the 55 were voting.
On the first vote, the General Director of the Standards body sent out the voting forms late, then changed the rules so that 50% majority was enough for a yes vote instead of normal 2/3rd majority.
He was ordered to redo the vote properly by the Hungarian Minister of Economy.
He did the vote again, but again he didn't follow the rules, sending the votes out himself. All very suspicious if you ask me. They should consider removing this man from his post if he can't follow the rules he's supposed to enforce.
Microsoft had the same choice everyone else did, you mean? To adopt ODF in their next version of Office?
And you call that "no choice" why? Because you're used to them doing blatantly illegal things such as faking evidence in trials to protect that monopoly. That document may be a decade old, but Microsoft's practices ala funding SCO, alleging hundreds of misused patents, etc, prove that it's business as usual.
Besides, if anyone, business or person, is allowed to profit from the results of crime it will only breed more crime. We need to level the field for honest businesses, ones who are forced out of the market by crooks who undercut them.