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OOXML Vote Tracker and Calculation Guide
Andy Updegrove writes "The vote on Microsoft's OOXML closes today. The final result will not be announced (or leak) before sometime early next week. Meanwhile the votes of individual countries continue to come in, currently with more reported switching in favor of OOXML than against it. For the benefit of those who want to keep track of how the vote is tending until it's official, I'm posting the running tally of which votes have switched, what the net change has been, now many votes have come to light, and how many remain to be announced. It's likely that it will not be possible to know the final result until all votes are in, due to the complex double test for approval, and the complication that the final number of abstentions — and whether they move from 'yes' or 'no' votes — can decrease the total number of votes that need to switch to 'yes' in order for OOXML to be approved. For that reason, I also include the algorithm for arriving at a final result."
I like the voting overview and discussion on OpenMalaysia blog better.
I hope that the EU antitrust investigation will somehow be successful in addressing this mess and punish Microsoft severely enough to dissuade them from trying such tactics ever again.
Why is Microsoft able to fuck up an international standards process so badly and so deliberately? Why does anyone tolerate this? Companies and governments should just refuse to use OOXML, and should refuse to accept ISO standards for certification.
Too bad they all care more about money than doing the right thing, huh.
The Register is reporting a switch for the UK from "No" to "Yes". If it's true then they've put it over.
This is bad not only for this standard but for the ISO in general. Their process is no longer trustworthy. We're going to have to go back to the bad old days of every nation setting their own incompatible standards.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Microsoft has throw way too much behind this for it to fail. What I would like to see is all the sellouts gets nailed legally for their nonsense. There are a lot of people putting forth ridiculous arguments in favour of OOXML. Valid arguments are cool, but some are just plain paid for. What I would like to understand from one of these people is how ODF can survive in the face of OOXML as an ISO standard.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
If there has been or even if there is just established process for doing so, perhaps that should be the next move. There's no doubt that these voting irregularities are driven by parties interested in OOXML's adoption as an ISO standard format, but what redress actions are possible after this fraud goes through?
Further, what is there to be said about the fact that not even Office 2007 complies with the OOXML standard? Doesn't that fact also exclude Office 2007 documents from being used in areas where ISO file formats are required?
There is the appeals process in ISO/IEC JTC1 which will certainly be attempted by one or more national bodies if the outcome of the vote is "approval". Valid grounds for such an appeal is provided for example by theh fact that at the Ballot Resolution Meeting, O-members (national bodies who only have "observer" status) were allowed to vote, although according to the rules they shouldn't have allowed to do that.
More promising IMO would be to file an appeal on the grounds of the WTO GPA (Government Procurement Agreement) and/or antitrust considerations, and at the same time file a lawsuit seeking a court order against ISO and IEC that the appeal shall be granted.
ISO is (supposed to be) a consensus-making body, not some kind of paper certification mill. What's supposed to happen is that all the interested parties sit down and hammer out a specification for a common interoperability system that they can all agree on; the voting procedure is just to make sure that nobody has derailed the process, and is usually just a final footnote after a long process that has generated real, compatible products by the time it is finished. Given that, there's really no need for a recall procedure - you know it's working because you have a market filled with products that work together by the time the specification is released in its final form.
This nonsense with OOXML is a gratuitous abuse that makes a mockery of the whole thing. There is not and never has been any attempt to build interoperability here. There is absolutely no value in it. The only ones to benefit are Microsoft, who are using it as marketing.
BTW, you already posted with two of your sockpuppet accounts in this article, some of them in the same thread. That's unfair and dishonest, and you shouldn't be doing it. The vast majority of people on Slashdot get along with only one account, and we take responsibility for our own words and the reactions they generate as far as the community-driven moderation system goes. When you're a little community of your own with five accounts, it's hard to take you seriously.
The twitter monologues. Click on my homepage and be amazed.
Join ECMA, pay the USD60000 and you can have your own ISO Standard guaranteed, even Fast tracked. For a 2.5% commission, I will file the proposed Standard on your behalf with ECMA, not matter what it is, even if there is no final spec, has never been implemented properly, has many un-documented bits, there already exist standards for the same field, will only benefit your company and the real plus: only you can approve changes to the spec and only you can implement it. Further, we promise complete secrecy on all issues related during the process. No consensus needed and the spec can be patented. Bulk submission welcomed.
So what? Msft has $40 billion in the bank. So what if EU gets $25 million, or whatever.
And so what if the slashdot/groklaw crowd knows about all the corruption? Msft has hundreds of millions of customers, and 99% of them don't give a damn.
Microsoft probably spent as much time on "marketing" the spec as they did on writing it. They've worked out and rehearsed their sales pitch. All the way through the process they'd be, "how can we sell this...how can we get it past the committee?".
Anybody who thinks otherwise is naive.
No sig today...
How about the fact that such an awful, immature, and unimplemented spec should never have been fast-tracked in the first place. Whatever ISO officials okayed that are either corrupt or grossly incompetent.
I used to have a fair amount of confidence in ISO. I spent roughly ten years involved with C standardization, and you know what? The process basically worked. We consistently ended up adopting things that really did work and had consensus, and rejecting things, sometimes even good ones, if we didn't have real consensus.
The OOXML "process" is a joke, and it reflects very, very, badly on ISO.
It's hard to express, in terms that non-standards-weenies would understand, just how absolutely, totally, ridiculous this is. This doesn't even loosely resemble the functioning of a real standards process. The proposed standard is utterly unusable, and furthermore, has no relationship at all to the normal scope of standardization.
Imagine, if you will, that the C99 standard had specified the exact set of allowed command-line options, and had explicitly defined behavior under dozens of circumstances of "undefined behavior" to precisely match the behavior of gcc. Only, it had versions for "gcc 1 compatibility" and "gcc 2 compatibility". Imagine that the standard dictated the precise form and text of every error message, and required total compatibility with gcc. Furthermore, imagine that it specifically required that the source of your compiler must be distributed under the GPL v2, and must make use of the libgcc glue code.
And then imagine that, instead of actually being approved by regular participants, this was rushed through at the last minute by a number of entities which had never shown the slightest interest in C standardization before.
That's pretty close to what's happening here, only it'd have been better, because at least it would be an open standard.
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