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Possible Manipulation of OOXML Process In Poland
michuk writes "IBM's representative for KT182 (the committee empowered to vote on OOXML in Poland) accused the committee's chair of intentionally manipulating the process. A letter from the president of the body overseeing KT182, sent a month ago to the committee chair for distribution to all committee members, was never distributed. The letter recommended that, if consensus were not achieved on the OOXML vote, then Poland should abstain. This follows up my recent report on the OOXML process in Poland (also covered by Groklaw), it looks like things are going bad this time, at least as bad as in October." The EU is already investigating the Polish process based on complaints last fall. Is anyone tracking all of the allegations and investigations surrounding OOXML?
Format name itself is cheating and (deliberately) confusing, to begin with.
839*929
Translation: http://tinyurl.com/2olcx4
Also on groklaw:
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20080328090328998
"Jomar Silva, a delegate from Brazil, which voted No, has now done what he said he would do and has posted what he saw and heard at the BRM. It is a deeply shocking tale of maneuvering the delegates to vote against their will by presenting a kind of Sophie's Choice of options, all designed, according to what I gather from his account, to get a positive result for Microsoft."
That is what this article seems to suggest:
http://osrin.net/2008/03/28/south-korea-votes-approve-for-isoiec-dis29500/
NoOOXML.org has been actively reporting on the process and tracking irregularities since last June or so. The list is very long and we're still collecting information.
My blog
0) Bill Gates contacted the president of Mexico and ask to approve ms-ooxml
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20080327104739103
1) Finland change is vote from Abstention to Yes without voting
http://www.groklaw.net/comment.php?mode=display&sid=20080327104739103&title=Finland+Changes+Vote+to+%26quot%3BYes%26quot%3B+after+Questionable+%26quot%3BConsensus%26quot%3B&type=article&order=&hideanonymous=0&pid=682930#c682940
2) Polish NB Chairwoman has changed the voting rules for the email ballot to "If you don't vote, it is counted as a YES", and she has threatened to sue committee members if they spread accusations
http://www.noooxml.org/forum/t-49455/polish-chairwomen-distributes-microsoft-propaganda
3) Romania voted Yes. There is strong suspicion of ballot-stuffing and the Romanian Standardization Organization has so far refused to offer any information other than the vote distribution.
http://www.noooxml.org/forum/t-49319/romania-votes-yes-again-ballot-stuffing-lack-of-transparencyro
http://www.noooxml.org/forum/t-47722/last-minute-committee-stuffing-in-romania
4) Cuba voted No in September but that its vote was counted as Yes
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20080324121844682
5) Brazilian representative alleges that he believes Microsoft has itself violated the "Law of Silence". It relates to Microsoft's claim that 98% of issues were resolved at the meeting, which he says is inaccurate, but his question relates to why Microsoft can talk about the BRM and no one else can. The Brazilian delegate has written to ITTF
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20080324220213437
6) Belgium: Yes man invade Technical Committee
http://www.noooxml.org/forum/t-48345/belgium-also-stuffed-with-microsoft-business-partners
7) Pakistan and Egypt stuffed?
http://www.noooxml.org/forum/t-48053/pakistan-and-egypt-stuffed
8) USA: The Yes men are back for voting in the United States. OOXML was adopted 17 votes against 4, thanks to Microsoft and their 11 Business Partners.
http://www.noooxml.org/forum/t-46044/committee-stuffing-also-in-the-united-states:11-microsoft-business-partners
9) German vote Yes: only Yes and Abstain vote admitted. Without very strong pressure from Microsoft Germany would have voted "ABSTAIN", with 9 to 8.
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20080327231223154
http://www.noooxml.org/forum/t-49525/limited-choice-at-german-din
10) Sweden: the vote is annulled because one member vote two times. No new vote will be cast because there are no time for a new vote (sorry no-link)
11) ISO has violated WTO rules accepting ms-ooxml as possible standard. Tineke Egyedi, president of the European Academy for Standardisation, is critical of OOXML being
...or that the president used pictures of a Canadian gay marriage in his speech on national television for homophobic propaganda purposes, and then denied being aware of it.
Yeah, politics in Poland are more than just a little fucked up. Same as usual.
NoOOXML.org has an english story about the vote in Germany: http://www.noooxml.org/forum/t-49525/limited-choice-at-german-din
In addition to being unable to vote "no", some people changed their vote under pressure from "abstain" to "abstain to the DIN vote".
This way, the final DIN vote resulted in a "yes".
MS uses their own DrawingML instead of SVG, their MS Math instead MathML, Dark Blue is coded as 000080 and not 00008B (SVG and ISO), MS country codes instead of ISO country codes, etc. Some of them are documented; some are not. However none of them are approved standards themselves. This means that in order to use OOXML completely, software must use MS standards. For things like DarkBlue and country codes, this is plain silly. Why should everyone in the world conform to uses MS standards when the ISO standard already exists.
Also using MS standards excludes any platform/software MS chooses to exclude including Linux, OS X, BSD, etc. For example the recommended format for DrawingML is Windows Meta File(WMF) which is Windows only and there are no plans to port it to another format or platform.
Besides being anti-competitive, the use of undocumented MS standards can be dangerous. For example, OOXML uses MS hashing and cryptographic functions which are not documented or approved or tested. Are these functions safe and effective? No one but MS knows. Again, there is an existing ISO standard on hashing and cryptographic functions.
OOXML uses units like English Metric Units (EMU) and "twips" (twentieths of a point). While somewhat defined, neither of them conform to any country's known units of measurements. Also in OOXML, different parts uses different units without any explanation. For example, some parts use twips while some parts are defined in points, half points, pixels, etc.
Many parts of the specification have undefined terms like the style "basicThinLine" (1 pt line?) and "plainText" (ASCII, UTF8?) . If software wanted to render a basicThinLine or use plainText, it would be up to interpretation to what that meant.
XML should be human readable but OOXML is littered with abbreviated, unclear element names like scrgbClr, algn, blurRad, dir, dist, rotWithShape.
Many parts of OOXML are written from a Western viewpoint of languages and customs with little consideration of other cultures. There are numerous examples where OOXML does not support Unicode which means only Latin based languages can fully implement OOXML. This affects all non-Latin based alphabets: Cyrillic (Russian, Belarussian, Ukranian), Middle Eastern (Arabic, Farsi), Asian (Chinese, Japanese, Korean),etc. For example, OOXML does not support RFC 3987 which means no Chinese characters in web addresses. Some functions are Western only: Networkdays() returns Saturday and Sunday as weekends which is true for the US but not Muslim countries.
autoSpaceLikeWord95, footnoteLayoutLikeWW8,mwSmallCaps, etc. Most of these are not documented. Even if they were, they require emulation of a MS product. That unfortunately brings MS patents. If another software emulated autoSpaceLikeWord95, MS could sue them for patent infringement, and MS has only promised that they will not to sue. Legally, their promises mean nothing, as they can go back on their word at any time.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
The chairperson deliberately hid a letter from the Polish Committee for Standardization (PKN)President, asking all members of the voting committee to change their vote to abstain as no national consensus was reached.
As the information about it came back to the PKN's President he decided to publish his letter on the PKN's website - http://www.pkn.pl/?pid=list_kt182&cid (polish only).