New Rules Created For OOXML Vote

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "There are new rules to follow for any NB that wishes to change their vote on OOXML after the lack of resolution at the recent Ballot Resolution Meeting. After comparing it to previous instructions, it seems that they only have until March 29th, they need to email several specific people, that email must be sent by certain people, and they need to confirm it in writing as well, most likely via registered mail. Even Groklaw's PJ, who made sense of many of SCO's filings, finds all the requirements a little confusing. But anyone who wants to disapprove of OOXML had better dot every 'i' and cross every 't' if they want their vote to count, if past behavior is any indication."

Comments

Hmm...

[Otter]

But anyone who wants to disapprove of OOXML had better dot every 'i' and cross every 't' if they want their vote to count, if past behavior is any indication.

If spelling counts, the open-source side is pretty much doomed. You might as well have CmdrTaco start drafting a concession speech right now.

They forgot the part about...

[dpilot]

You ALSO had to send the filing to the zoning office...

in a locked basement
with a sign on the door, "Beware of Alligators"
in a condemned building

on the third planet of Alpha Centauri

Moral of the story

[ShieldW0lf]

ISO doesn't matter anymore. They didn't matter because they were "The ISO", they mattered because they were a place where politics could be set aside and everyone could work together to make standards that work. That was a unique and precious thing. Now they're not these things anymore, and therefore, they are defunct.

MS didn't drag themselves up a notch here, they just destroyed something special in the world because it got in the way of their dominance. A sad thing.

Re:Moral of the story

[Zeinfeld]

Its still completely wrong. Standards bodies really do not matter in the way people at slashdot imagine they do. ISO has a complete set of standards for a networking infrastructure, nobody uses it. The Internet was the competition.

During the early 90s many if not most people who were working on the Internet thought it was only a matter of time before the OSI stack replaced it. Didn't turn out that way despite ISO accreditation.

ISO standards do not need to be open or unencumbered. It is not a democratic process.

All the standards process means is that if OOXML is accepted and someone wants to claim their product is OOXML they have to comply with the spec. It does not mean that its open, unencumbered or any good. It does not even mean that it has to work. It does not mean that you have to use the result.

Re:Moral of the story

[CrazedWalrus]

I was reflecting a few evenings ago on the fact that we, as techies, still play with computers because they're fun and we like to build/break/explore stuff. It used to be that people like us could make something in our garage that would make the world stand up and go "Whoa!" (just ask Woz).

Fortunately for our paychecks, and unfortunately for our hobbies and killer business ideas, computers have grown into An Industry. It's gotten very difficult (not impossible) for a person in their garage to do much worthwhile due to patents, the head starts of competitors, and the fact that the lonesome programmer is severely outgunned by mature software shops. It's a world where good ideas are flattened by a truckload of money from established players. In other words, it's become business as usual -- the same as in other established fields like financial services or retail merchandise.

I guess that means that we need to learn to play hard ball. I don't really know what that means, except that I think we, as a group, tend to spend a lot of time complaining about the corporations, but don't really spend much time figuring out how to get that same power for ourselves.

I think the only way would be for the F/OSS world to figure out how to work "like" a corporation without necessarily being one. The first thing to do would be to define what it is about a corporation that gives it its competitive edge, and then figure out how to replicate each point for F/OSS as a whole (as opposed to just Mozilla, Red Hat, etc). Superior software and development models will only get us so far. At some point, we need to learn to fight at MS's level.

There's no sense challenging someone to a duel of swords when the other guy wouldn't think twice about pulling a gun. That just means we need to work on our marksmanship, or we don't stand a chance.

I guess this proves it

[JeremyGNJ]

It has long been rumored that Microsoft wants to actually show that ISO is not such a great standards organization. I guess this proves it. As usual, Microsoft wins either way.

Re:It works the other way too

[blind monkey 3]

Special rules for any company has to be viewed with suspicion, special rules when a company has actually been caught buying votes is even more worrying.
Worse than that, some people are actually accepting this as SOP and still want to give the "benefit of the doubt" to them.
A lot of irregularities have occurred in favour of Microsoft, rules have been bent in favour of Microsoft, my suspicion is this will favour Microsoft. You believe, I gather, that it will not favour anyone.... why the change? Again, another change in procedure.....

Changing your mind is not always "wishy-washy".

[Haeleth]

You should have to do more (this much more? Not my decision but it does seem odd) to change your vote. Why'd you change your mind? What made you vote for it in the first place?

IIRC several countries voted "yes with comments". If their comments were not addressed satisfactorily, they might now want to change their vote. What's "wishy-washy" about voting conditionally and then deciding to change your vote when the conditions are not met?

Voters might also have initially missed problems in this incredibly long and complicated document that other participants found; they might therefore have voted "yes" initially, and now desire to change that vote to "no" because the evidence available to them has convinced them that the initial "yes" vote was mistaken. What's wrong with changing your mind when presented with new evidence? What's wrong with listening to competing viewpoints and recognising that the person arguing against your initial belief has valid points?

Or they might have been convinced by Microsoft representatives that OOXML would end global poverty, and have now concluded that the truth doesn't match up to the PR. If someone is convinced by a hard-selling salesman to buy a product they don't need, are they being "wishy-washy" when they cool off and cancel the order? No, they're just displaying common sense.

Above all, why are people so hostile towards anyone who changes their mind these days? Sticking to your guns regardless is not strong or smart, it's stubborn and stupid. We should applaud people who publicly change their opinions, not condemn them. Wait for someone to actually dither indecisively, or flip-flop repeatedly between two options, before you condemn them. There's nothing wrong with merely taking one side initially and then changing your mind.

(And, no, I'm not being partisan here. I would say the same in defence of someone who had initially voted against OOXML and had decided, based on the outcome of the BRM, that they would now support it.)

ISO SQL editor's view of OOXML process

[pieterh]

Here's a little of what Jim Melton, the ISO SQL editor, had to say about the OOXML process:

You've written 6000 pages of specification largely in secret (and, I understand, recently added over 1500 more pages) and given the world five months to read, absorb, understand, review, critique, and establish informed positions on it. Worse, whether it happened because of unreasonable methods, pure random chance, or genuine and unexpected interest, the fact that the size of the JTC 1 Subcommittee that was to vote on the document suddenly exploded gives the appearance that somebody was trying too hard to stack the deck...almost as though it wasn't really desired to have too much real review.

BTW SQL was one of the largest ever ISO standards and took 20 years to debug. It was still smaller than OOXML.

And, Please sign the NoOOXML.org petition if you didn't already!

Here's why

[g2devi]

> But these are rules for how National Bodies
Precisely. These are National Bodies, i.e. slow moving bureaucracies.

If you shorten the dates and in addition to that require extra lead time for written letters to arrive to all the right people, you've both dramatically shorted the review time and caused problems for any national body that scheduled their meeting late (so that maximum review was possible). If you think it's easy rescheduling a meeting of all these key people much earlier than what everyone agreed to *months* in advance, you've never held a meeting of any importance.

And by limiting decent to a single person, they've also increased the chance that the will of the national body could be thwarted by a bribe.

> If those groups, with their staffs and lawyers, can't figure out how to change their vote, and to use ISO procedural
> rules to make sure their votes are properly counted, perhaps they shouldn't be able to change their votes. I'm sorry, but this isn't exactly rocket science...

Sorry, but that's BS. If I give you rules that are impossible to follow, no number of lawyers or staff can follow them any more than if I ask you to draw a Frobizoid without explaining what a Frobizoid is, or ask you to fill out form G in order to get Form F but in order to get form G you have to fill out form F.

And even if the rules are unambigious to an elite lawyer, the more complicated the rules, the more likely that votes can be thrown out because of procedural rather than technical issue. Given the mistrust in the process so far, I wouldn't be at all surprised if No to Yes transitions happen (because Microsoft knows the rules they wrote) but Yes/Abstain to No votes are rejected because of non-obvious procedural issues.

Ask yourself this question. Is ISO in place to be a place where lawyers must solve puzzles to get to the next level, or is it a place to create valuable world wide standards that have been proven technically?