Slashdot Mirror
Open Letter to ISO Calls For Standardization of Process
In a recent open letter to the ISO FreeCode CEO Geir Isene calls for standardization in the processes used by the ISO to help prevent future OOXML blunders. "It seems ISO is not prepared for a politicized process where a big and influential commercial enterprise will use any means possible to push its own standard through to certification. Committees are flooded by the vendor in support of the standard. Votes are bought and results are hijacked. Several national bodies have flawed and skewed procedures open for corruption."
LOL
I thought standardization was the point of ISO.
Can't remember the details, but within the past few years a committee working on an IEEE standard caused so many complaints that IEEE disbanded the committee and started the process all over. It was also a case of suspected corporate tampering.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
for them to follow when creating a standard... the existing procedure is a massive hodge-podge of sub-committees and other groups which do not appear to be following a standard procedure for making their decisions...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
When I hear someone seriously propose standardizing the standardization process my first thought is that the level of bureaucracy has reached a point where its time to run for the hills. Thanks to prior standardization efforts I should still be reachable by cell...
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
how will they run the process for standardizing their standardization process without a standard process for processing standardization? Argh, my head....
Whatever the merit of his suggestions, the idea that ISO is new to high-pressure corporate gamesmanship and requires a condescending lecture from a titan of industry like "the CEO of Freecode" has to qualify as the laugh of the day.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Keep the process non-standardized. Make it organic and not a mechanical process. It is much easier to prevent an organic process from being gamed in that manner. If it was standardized, then there wouldn't be as good of an opportunity to reject obvious manipulations.
welcome to the age of recursion
"Hannibal's plans never work right. They just work." Amy/A-Team
They need to develop standards for standardizing their decision process for developing standards.
It shouldn't be a big deal... it's a fairly standard problem.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Wasn't Microsoft's current dominance of the market an organic process at the beginning? Do you really want that again? I would think that your suggestion would create another monoculture.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
...they should standardize the way they standardize the standardization process. Just in case.
ISO is supposed to serve all of us, not just M$. You don't have to have a position in ISO to become affected by it. Also you don't have to be in ISO to want it to be free of corporate manipulations.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
If true International consensus is to be achieved, then the criteria for adopting a submission as standard must be altered. The present criteria state:
1. Over 67% of P-grade members to vote Yes.
2. Less than 25% overall members could vote No.
The scope for abuse wiht the above criteria exists because 'countries' like Khazakstan, Cote' de Ivorie and Cyprus have equal voting rights; and can become P-members as well. So, the ISO could consider modifying the voting requirements on the lines of the Senate / House pattern:
1. The over 67% P-grade members criterion to be amended as "Positive votes corresponding to over 67% of the total population represented". Populous natins like India, China, the UK, Brazil have all voted No. The present ISO rules allow this popular opinion to be sidelined.
2. Secondly, lots of new 'countries' have opted for voting and P-status. None of these have participated or voted in any other sphere of the ISO actvities. This points strongly to financial inducements and corruption, and cannot be dismissed as coincidence. The rules must be altered before the BRM in February.
3. Thirdly, Microsoft has admitted to wrong-doing in the voting process in Sweden. This alone ought to be sufficient for the ISO to null and void the entire submission, and debar said firm for a minimum period. There is no credibility if rules are blindly applied, when benefitting parties themselves are guilty of subversion. This is similar to the submission of licenses to the OSI - the standards bodies must take into account past conduct and sincerity; not just rule on technicalities.
4. Fourthly, the "Yes, with comments" option must be removed. This is meaningless, and mischevous. What incentive does a vested interest have in listening to these comments, and redressing the grievances?
5. The ISO must take a clear stance wrt patents. Any patent-encumbered submission must be rejected until:
a. The submission is amended so as to be patent-free
b. The patents in question have expired all over the world.
More later.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
Man, that went right over your head. The parent isn't saying we should sit around, and isn't even criticizing Freecode's "CEO". It's saying that ISO is perfectly at home with political pressure, not exactly a virgin in the field, and Freecode's "CEO" doesn't carry a lot of weight anyway, not exactly being a "heavy hitter".
Nothing in the parent's post even suggest that he/she feels we should leave ISO and Microsoft to a closed source orgy. But suggesting that ISO is having the wool pulled over it's eyes is ignorant. ISO knows exactly what's going on.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
I don't think standardisation will help. On the contrary, a rigid well documented standardised procedure for approvals will make it far easier for a large corporation to understand the process and exploit or subvert it, with ISO then stuck in its own standards.
What's more important is transparency, that each member documents exactly the process by which it reached a particular decision, and that decisions within each member of ISO, not necessarily across members, are roughly consistent.
You need a procedure to set up a procedure to scrutinize the procedural procedures *pop* Head asplode, game over.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
How old is this CEO - 13? He sounds like a whiny little whatever.
In any case, he's late to the party. Vendors have been trying to get standards bodies to favor their wares since the dawn of standards. If anything, I think a vendor's ability to force through a standard in this manner ensures that that standard can get off the whiteboard and actually make it to a product the world can use, because a vendor isn't going to throw any effort at a standard unless it thinks there's a market that can benefit from it.
Will Microsoft pay companies to vote against the ISO for standardization of ISO's?
If you mod this up, your slashdot background will turn into a beautiful sunset!
a. The submission is amended so as to be patent-free
b. The patents in question have expired all over the world. ISO already does take the beginning of a clear stance: all essential patents must be licensed on reasonable and non-discriminatory terms. But I agree that "reasonable" and "non-discriminatory" have not been applied consistently with the goals of free software or open source.
Are you sure you want to jump right into processing standardization with out a preliminary informal sit-down? Run a memo among your peers and see if you can leverage any useful synergies first. Then create an executive summary for review.
A goal is a dream with a deadline
There's so many to choose from.
Now go to your room and think about what you did wrong.
1. make a country
2. Join ISO as a coting member
3. Say you will vote No with comments
4. ???
5. profit
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
Let's hope it's applied to voting in general. It might help to reduce the effects of money on the electorate and of lobbying in congress.
What?
All that is required is a oversite panel. At the first hint of something not exactly right the panel would have the athority to halt the proess and investigate the problem.
This coupled with the requirment of P contries to be active participents within the ISO would also go along way to preventing this method of abuse.
In addition say you have to be an active observer for 2 years before applying for P status or something like that and in order to maintain your P status you have to be an ongoing active participent in n% of the processes up for discussion.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
I would look forward to and support any process implemented in the ISO that would ensure people only voted according to how the facts measured up to an unbiased set of requirements, and the process was not influenced by money-induced or ideological bias.
I'm sure ISO is happy to take advice about corporate influence from someone involved in scientology:
http://home.oursites.net/geirisene/
(Yes, it's the same person, I have worked with him, thus posting anonymously)
Second hit on Google:
http://www.google.com/search?q=geir%20isene
From a developer point of view I'll parse any XML. If said corruption wins the day I'll being parse Microsoft Open XML with XML parsers otherwise I'll parse OpenDocument XML format with same XML parsers.
Hell, I'll even parse both formats or convert one into another with same XML parsers.
All that crap happens all the time nowadays.
;)
It's just the usual Microsoft doing "version 1.0" of "Influencing Standards Bodies" really badly. Wait till their 4th or 5th try at it.
Hardly anyone making new standards is really interested in the good of the industry much less the world.
In the past the geeks made TCP/IP etc because it was just a bunch of geeks who wanted to get things to _work_ and get stuff done.
Nowadays, it's "How can we influence the standard so we can get an advantage".
If someone actually comes up with a decent standard the competitors will just try to come up with something different.
Lots of crap standards nowadays - look at WiFi - they could have taken a leaf from SSL, and had a standard that allowed _secure_anonymous_ connections, but instead you get the huge mess that's WiFi- where it's easy to be open and insecure, and difficult to be secure.
Look at the upcoming HTML standards, all "throttles" and no "brakes", nobody _really_ cares about security. They just tell people to "please drive safely, and you should stay in your lane and not crash please raise a security exception instead", but do they really lift a finger to help?
AMD come up with Hyper Transport? No way is Intel going to support it.
And then there's RDRAM and the whole bunch of people trying to get their patents into standards.
metastandardisation.
Parsing the XML isn't a problem. The problem is that the elements that you get out of your parse tree are best described as "unknown unspecified binary blob". You don't know what the contents of the parse tree mean. Even if you are lucky and get a specified result like "behave like word '97", you won't be able to follow it without actually getting a copy of word 97 and testing it to see what it does.
XML is really solving a totally irrelevant problem here. What you need to know is all the stuff that XML doesn't specify.
Bribery, in any form, is counter to a constructive global economy. Allow no closed ISO Standards. That way, if some FUBAR'red ISO standard is allowed to exist; It can be ignored by the rest of us. As a side benefit, it would allow Darwinian Socialism to occur to rich fools.
It seems that all these standards bodies were prone to politicking and corruption, but only recently it has become so apparent and stinging. Still... ISO handled the issue better than ANSI or IEC alone. (AFAIR both have accepted OpenXML in the fast track.)
That's the case with any XML document, whether Microsoft's or "open". The point seems moot.
What also needs addressing here is the ethical way this was abused by MS. OK, it does now seem MS are exempt to be held accountable for their unethical and immoral behaviour - but after Enron and virtually every Company worldwide had to go and improve and PROVE ethical behavour of all employees, Companies that TRADE with unethical companies should be punished also.
So, all those that did take the bribes, all those that did the dirty work for MS here should be held accountable.
Doesn't anybody else find it strange that MS and it's allies can launch an attck like this that is totally unethical (maybe in the rules, but it is still unethical and immoral) to do this?
I was going to explain this OOXML x ODF imbroglio and tried to establish first what ISO is... and mentioned the most popular ISO9000 certification as an example.
The person to whom I was talking, being totally lay at the matter, came up with a brilliant question: Is ISO certified, too? Then who certifies them?
It came to me right atm the old saying "Who watch the watchers?" (please anyone with Latin knowledge help me here)
Microsoft gained a lot of leeway at ISO. This shouldn't be possible to ANYone.
Simple. Commitees shall have absolutely no contact of any kind with any commercial enterprise with a vested interest in the standard being evaluated. Use a sequestered court room jury as a template. No outside information in. Give em the materials they need to evaluate and lock the doors until they're done. Also monitor bank transfers, etc., to insure payouts aren't being made prior to sequester.
Unfortunately, very likely due to undue influence of Emca on the ISO/IEC JTC1 Fast-Track process (ca 80% of their fast-track submissions are from Ecma, and ISO/IEC seem to consider it good and valuable to get many such submissions) the ISO/IEC rules about patent disclosure are not applied to the fast-track process, but Ecma's much lower standards (requiring only a RAND commitment) are applied. (To this day Microsoft has not disclosed the patent numbers of their alleged patent rights claims on OOXML.)
I thought Scientologists didn't trust "wog" software and designed their own (which I understand to be crap)?
Seems odd that they'd care about the ISO. Then again, they ARE big fans of large systems of pointless rules which they consider part of the "religious technology" that supposedly makes them superior...
Hell, if they route you to ethics for doing something bad, I swear that filling out forms is part of your punishment. To me, that would seem more akin to a subtle kind of mental torture, but what do I know?
Standards cease to be standards if Microsoft buys them, and they contain technically flawed specifications that are difficult or impossible to implement for Microsoft's only competitors (open source). Standards must be free of proprietary 'intellectual property', or they are effectively unimplementable for Microsoft's only competitors, and are hence totally worthless. Microsoft's definition of 'open' does not seem to match other peoples'. Why can't Microsoft just call a proprietary specification by its proper name. They are only confusing and irritating their own customers. Ultimately, Microsoft will only damage themselves through flawed and complicated abominations like their proprietary office XML specification (which is a horrible abuse of XML anyway)
That's the case with any XML document, whether Microsoft's or "open". The point seems moot.
No, it isn't!
The semantics of an XHTML file, for example, are precisely specified (and if that is not the case so that there be underspecified points, that is a bug in the specification and the intent of everyone involved is that it be corrected) MS's "open" format is nowhere close to that (neither wrt the specification of the semantics nor wrt the intent...)