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OOXML Will Pass Amid Massive Irregularities
Tokimasa notes a CNet blog predicting that OOXML will make the cut. Updegrove agrees, as does the OpenMalasia blog. Reports of irregularities continue to surface, such as this one from Norway — "The meeting: 27 people in the room, 4 of which were administrative staff from Standard Norge. The outcome: Of the 24 members attending, 19 disapproved, 5 approved. The result: The administrative staff decided that Norway wants to approve OOXML as an ISO standard." Groklaw adds reportage of odd processes in Germany and Croatia.
Sounds like something a gastroentorologist would diagnose.
This is insane.
No day goes by without hearing from some croporate giant running roughshod over the laws, procedures or institutions of democratic countries.
The United States have let a handful of mega-croporations totally wreck it's economy with the blessing of the government that was elected while pulling the wool over the electorate's eyes.
It is time for the people to revolt, and put the croporations back to where they belong by firmly asserting the power of the government over croporations, if need by, by the croporate death penalty and the confiscation of the croporation's assets.
The government has thoroughly been subverted by croporate cronies; those should be charged with subversive sedition and thrown in jail and the key tossed in the Marianas trench.
If OOXML passes and the ISO finds out about the ir-regularities; and later the uselessness of the standard; can it meet again to de-recognise the standard? If so what is the procedure for this?
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
I personally see the passive of OOXML as sign of a failure in the standards process. This thing in no way should pass, and there ought to be some sort of punishment for the attempts to subvert the integrity of the process by MS.
Finally: the details about the final results of the BRM
This kind of shocking. The ISO, an organization which has existed in high regard for sixty years, is done. They will no doubt continue as a holder of legacy certifications that will continue to matter for as long as they are not superseded, but as far as a respected body they are over. In a single act they have completely discredited their own approval process and by extension everything they approve.
No one looking to establish a new, credible, standard in an field relating to software or information exchange will ever use them as a prime standards body again. They are now a marketing term and not a professional resource.
The League of Nations came and went. The United Nations has allowed it's self to be discredited by militant, hegemonic nations. Now the ISO has been compromised by a flawed process and corrupt bureaucrats enabling a monopoly corporation. This international bureaucracy is no more legitimate than the decisions they make.
Freedom is free.
Everybody knows they gamed the process in one way or another and didn't 'earn' the vote as others have in the past. These actions says a lot for the company's ethics if you ask me. I expect that they probably made a bunch of deals with less reputable more desperate firms, organizations and individuals that will further behold them to such dealings.
Microsoft seems to be a lot about deal making now a days from lowering the specs to Microsoft vista capable requirements and their shifty legal contracts that they conned Novell to sign without enough review.
While this may "buy" them some market share they still have a butt-load of aging technology which mainly advertises "improved security" over any other sort of innovation or compatibility. Ultimately it means they will have to continuing paying-off for their market else face real critical comparison.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
Its not so much that we hate OOXML, its just that we like to scream revolution and blasphemy.
Control is an illusion, order our comforting lie. From chaos, through chaos, into chaos we fly
http://www.noooxml.org/open:rejectooxmlnow/
^ Some reasons
I myself am no critical analyzer of standards, but the fact that the standard will still have a microsoft copyright on it is enough for me to say no. If, let's say, it was adobe instead of microsoft (and isn't pdf, for there are opensource implementations of pdf), I would still have the same viewpoint.
Standards shouldn't have disclosed code in, which is why I believe if something like a document format is standardized, the source code should be open to all.
If I am wrong about OOXML in that way, someone correct me.
1. OpenDocument already exists. What good does a second format, based on identical principles, do for the world? 2. OOXML requires the use of patented algorithms, which makes open source developers nervous, especially when a company that despises open source and has an ongoing campaign to kill the open source movement happens to be the patent holder...and happens to be pushing the format. 3. OOXML is exceedingly difficult to implement, giving Microsoft an automatic advantage over everyone else and forcing us to play catch-up (though OOo3 will have native support, IIRC). 4. This is /., and the format is Microsoft supported. What did you expect?
Palm trees and 8
20 good reasons to disapprove OOXML
... Microsoft therefore had to rush this standard through. Its a simple matter of commercial interests!" A disapproval would motivate the submitter to contribute to the existing ISO Office format, ODF (ISO 26300). We find historical precedence for a proposed Microsoft standard being disapproved in order to constructively motivate harmonization of standards: the Microsoft VML and W3C SVG standards. Microsoft's VML was rejected at the W3C in favour in Adobe's SVG. Microsoft's response was to join the W3C working group to improve SVG which later became a W3C standard. To the extent that SVG is incorporated into ISO/IEC:26300 SVG is an official ISO/IEC/ITTF international standard.
1. ISO's "Fast Track" process was abused for standard development 'on the fly'. In the past ECMA has "fast tracked" small (50-500 page), mature and industry accepted standards. OOXML is large (6000+ pages) and immature. An editorial of Redmond Developer News described: "By contrast [to ISO 26300], the Microsoft OOXML specification takes what might be called a kitchen sink approach." -- an ISO process is not thought to become a kitchen sink for half-baked ECMA standards. OOXML was only released in 2006 and is hardly accepted by the industry. The OOXML community around the format is a community of one. All third party supporters have contractual relations with the vendor. The limitations of the "Fast Track" process; fast evaluation time frames, extremely limited time to resolve all the concerns and little room for modification has demonstrated that the "Fast Track" process was unsuitable for OOXML. It gives us little surprise as the process was never intended for standard development.
2. OOXML is a proposed parallel standard without a justification. No empirical evidence was provided for the assertion that OOXML faithfully represents the corpus of existing documents of a specific vendor as opposed to the existing ISO standard or customized versions thereof. ECMA's branding of the format as a silver bullet for archiving cannot be tested by NBs. Additionally ECMA failed to provide a mapping between the legacy binary formats and OOXML. The binary legacy specifications was only made public in 2008. Multiple standards for the very same purpose with conversion issues undermine the respect for ISO standardization. You need a consistent justification to adopt another ISO standard for the same field which is not build upon an existing ISO standard - not to mention backwards compatibility to ISO 26300 architecture.
3. OOXML's ISO agenda is to undermine the adoption of the existing ISO Office standard. OOXML evangelist Mahugh explained: "When ODF was made an ISO standard, Microsoft had to react quickly as certain governments have procurement policies which prefer ISO standards.
4. OOXML is incompatible with ISO/IEC and WTO Technical Barrier to Trade (TBT) basic principles, which ISO/IEC are supposed to respect. The BRM added the notion of "Microsoft Office 97 to Microsoft Office 2008 inclusive" to which products' formats a 'faithful representation' is sought by the proposed ISO standard. International standards are not permitted to discriminate specific vendors positively, and thus all competitors negatively. The standard would become a technical market barrier, a tool of unfair competition. Formally a standard is supposed to avoid referencing products. Non-compliance with WTO requirements on technical barriers to trade due to formalities will be an obstacle for the adoption of OOXML in the public sector and undermine trust in the ISO label.
5. The BRM heavily amended those ECMA 'dispositions of comments' it had time to discuss. The BRM only discussed about 10% of the known technical issues. Of 54 non-editorial issues covered in detail, 48 were modified at the BRM. This left 850 issues without check-over, and pushed through by a bulk vote. These
This is what happens when academics go head to head with corporations.
The corporations will win every time. As smart as academics are, they just aren't prepared for this kind of thing.
For linux tips: http://www.linuxtipsblog.com
Because, unlike most other other ISO standards for documents, like fax G3 and G4 compression, and ODF (Open Document Format) OOXML literally cannot be implemented by anyone other than Microsoft. This is not because the entire rest of the world contains no competent programmers, but because the standard simply does not have enough information to do so. Microsoft wrote the proposed standard with what amount to calls into their libraries of legacy Word code, the actions of which are NOT documented, rather than "tag X requires an indent level of 30000 millipels from the indent level of the enclosing block", or whatever.
... to prevent a resurrection of Microsoft.
The entire purpose of OOXML is to subvert the increasing call for public documents to be stored in a format that can A) be read without buying Word/Office/..., on the theory that documents created in a citizen's government should be available to those citizens without paying a corporate "tax", and B) that by documenting the format of the documents, readers/editors can be created, as needed, at a future time when the original creation tool may no longer exist or have a computer on which to run, unlike, say, Word documents, where support for older formats is simply dropped by Microsoft.
Microsoft is an ongoing criminal organization, and as such, should be seized under the RICO act, and its parts sold off or its source code simply published for those parts without buyers, and the buyers should be forever blocked from forming a cartel, single company, sharing directors,
What's the quote? Never ascribe to malice what can adequately be explained by ignorance?? It's pick your poison time. Do you rely on an organization run by complete idiots? Or one run by completely corrupt officials?? Either way, I'd say ISO has become a lot less important.
No sig for you!!
The EU is already investigating their influence on the OSI process, countless of companies are pissed that their voices were not heard due to Microsoft bribes and whatnot, the media will love this one. I seriously think Microsoft has shot themselves in the foot here. Big time.
http://docs.oasis-open.org/office/v1.1/OS/OpenDocument-v1.1.pdf
OOXML:
http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/files/ECMA-ST/Office%20Open%20XML%20Part%201%20(PDF).zip
http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/files/ECMA-ST/Office%20Open%20XML%20Part%202%20(PDF).zip
http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/files/ECMA-ST/Office%20Open%20XML%20Part%203%20(PDF).zip
http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/files/ECMA-ST/Office%20Open%20XML%20Part%204%20(PDF).zip
http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/files/ECMA-ST/Office%20Open%20XML%20Part%205%20(PDF).zip
Be broken! Or at least bent. An old relative of mine, years ago when I was a child said that the laws are merely a fence, which keeps bovines in their place. Big dogs jump over them and little puppies slink under them, but only bovines are kept in check.
It sounds far better in its native tongue than it does translated to english, but pay heed that this holds true regardless of the country.
Likewise, for running roughshod over laws, most laws aren't written to help "the people" and never were. Recall the "regulative restrictions" placed upon CB (citizen's band) radios in the USA, requiring that individuals pay a 10 dollar license fee and getting "registered".
It was a shitty law meant to squeeze blood from the proverbial turnip. People did not comply, at all. When the regulation was reduced to mere "sign a form so we know you have one" (aka registration) people still refused. As a result, the whole thing was dropped formally due to "mass non compliance".
Irony? People still want to have legislators set the rules, when the simple rule is, as always has been, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you, but do it first and do it well." The legislators know this, which is why, regardless of the country or the century or the millenium, all governing bodies fuck the people good and hard, and then pretend it is someone else's fault.
"It is the free market's fault. It is the free individual's fault. It is society's fault."
If people disapprove of Microsoft's standards, then they should NOT USE THEM! PERIOD!! There are plenty of competing standards, and plenty of clean open source software out there. Use it, or lose it. Just like freedom. It isn't granted by others. It is freely available to those who would make use of it and be cognizant of its presence and benefits. Period. Everything else on this subject is bullshit excuse making from impotent and incompetent wimps unable to stop from penis envy with Bill Gates. Instead of trying to "beat" the big boys, start actually side stepping them. Like the airlines and the big telecoms, they are ALL obsolete. So is central government and big agencies and militaries. The world's people will never see this, regardless of how blatantly visible it is to some of us. Stop asking for others to prohibit all options you can have, and exercise the power of your choice and your wallet. You don't like Gates or Microsoft? Don't buy their shit. Don't like starbucks? Don't buy their cappucinos (in fact I make a far nicer one at home, and I get to put rum in mine too!!) Get used to it. If you don't approve of a company, STOP GIVING THEM PRESS... stop buying their products, and instead promote those that espouse the beliefs and values you support. I use Linux and BSD and rarely if ever drop back to windows to play a game WINEX doesn't support yet. That's it. My choices? Yes. Took me four years to find and purchase the right wireless cards I wanted. Did I switch back to windows because WPA supplicant didn't work right when they first started? No, I merely did without wireless and went so far as to patch mine in a crude and unapproved fashion. The fixes are in and it works okay now. I made choices. So should you. Stop being angry. It helps nothing and wastes your energy pointlessly.
Hope my advice helps. I spent a lot of time being angry and political campaigning, here and IRL. None of it helped. Letting go, and voting with my walleet and my feet helped more. Try it.
" What luck for rulers that men do not think" - Adolf Hitler
Why does /. hate OOXML so much? Every time a story is ran about OOXML, everyone on /. seems to scream revolution and blasphemy.
/. hates that, see the results of the current poll about how many books a year slashdotters read.
1. It's a 6000-page spec (plus another 1500 or so pages in response to negative comments from the September ballot). For a facetious answer as to why
2. It violates ISO guidelines in that rather than referring to existing standards wherever possible, it invents new (and broken) ones. E.g. MS vs ISO country codes, MS vs ISO date handling (including broken leap years), MS vs ISO color codes, MS vs ISO's math markup, etc, etc.
3. It's under-specified, e.g. tags like 'lineSpaceLikeWord95'.
4. Even assuming it were specified well enough to implement, such implementations would be at risk of Microsoft patents, notwithstanding Micosoft's so-called patent pledge (which amounts to promising not to sue hobbyist programmers who develop 100%-compliant code in their basements, but doesn't extend that promise to anyone else or to anyone sharing or actually using the code).
5. For more, see the thousand or so comments brought to the BRM and not individually addressed, or the hundreds of additional problems found with the spec since the BRM.
While some people probably wouldn't touch MS-OOXML even if it were perfect (and it's a long way from that) simply because it came from Microsoft, the vast majority of its nay-sayers are complaining about it's piss-poor technical quality, and would be doing so no matter who originally authored such a crappy spec.
Anyone who has ever had to try to develop software from a self-contradictory, ambiguous and incomplete specification -- which probably includes a fair percentage of slashdotters -- rightly runs screaming at the thought of this turd achieving ISO blessing. (Ditto for anyone who has ever had to try to use such software in conjunction with some other software a different team developed to the "same" spec.)
-- Alastair
Are you joking?
ISO standards are supposed to be clearly and completely defined. These standards definitions are created so that multiple parties can participate in government and other public activities through information interchange.
OOXML fails in very serious ways to fit that description. Not only are various aspects of the 'standard' vague, but they reference descriptions of behaviors of a particular software application on a particular platform without defining what that means. Without any issues of politics and anything 'human,' by ISO's definition and rules of adoption or creation, OOXML is technically not eligible to be an ISO standard.
Beyond this is the use of the "fast track" approval process. This process is supposed to exist to enlist standard formats that are in wide and common use. Formats like PDF and PNG, if they are not already ISO standards, might be good candidates for such since they are already in very heavy use and are very clearly defined and implemented widely. The OOXML format, as defined, is not a "ubiquitous" format. It's not even implemented completely or correctly by the company that has defined it. And because it is not clearly defined, cannot be correctly implemented by other parties. All of this means it is ineligible for the fast track approval process.
Finally, after it initially failed the fast track process in spite of wild irregularities in the process, this second attempt has resulted in passage but does so with further irregularities. Each participating country in the process operates through its own set of rules. In various examples, these rules were either changed, convoluted, or simply ignored. In some instances, the results seem to indicate simple and direct fraud.
All of this represents corruption and possibly the destruction of the purpose of ISO approval.
If ISO were a pure religion, what Microsoft has caused to happen would be called blasphemy. If ISO were a court, what Microsoft has caused to happen would be called a travesty. And if ISO were a business, what Microsoft has caused to happen, it would be fraud.
Acceptance as an ISO standard means that a file format is eligible for use in various official and public purposes. The purpose of requiring an ISO standard for such formatting is to allow any and all parties interested in participating the opportunity to do so by following a clearly defined and published standard. In the case of OOXML, this would be impossible for any party other than Microsoft to do this effectively since the definition is incomplete and defined by the behavior of its applications which are subject to revision. In the event that a government process or activity requires the use of this "ISO" standard, it effectively excludes all other vendors but Microsoft from participating.
I'm not sure how much more clearly the problem with OOXML's adoption as an ISO standard can be defined. It's not a question of "hating" OOXML. It's a matter of subverting a definition and process that has been depended upon internationally to clearly and precisely define standards of process and information interchange.
I agree with that. I haven't used any MS software, any Adobe software, or any eggs from caged chickens in several years. I've also gotten a friend to switch one of his systems from WinXP to Kubuntu instead of buying a legit license for it. (It came from a relative with a cracked version of XP.) I've stopped buying potted plants and started just saving and planting seeds to save all that diesel spent shipping little seedlings around. I have no idea if it makes any difference to MS, Adobe, Raley's, WalMart, etc. but it does make a difference to me.
WARNING: Smoking this sig may cause lowered IQ, insanity or short term memory loss. It is also really bad for your monit
Where before, ISO standardization was a fair and democratic process that usually resulted in international standards that made industries run smoothly and on an open level field ... thanks to the actions of Microsoft, ISO standardization is now a process that can, with sufficient resources, be outright bought in order to protect and extend an international monopoly for years to come.
There's a word to describe the activity of making that kind of change. Microsoft uses this word to describe itself all the time.
The word is: innovation.
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It's actually more of a victory than that. The whole point of this is that many organizations (governments, corporations) have said they want to store their documents in an ISO-recognized file format.
Basically, this makes Office qualify for that, but still have what amounts to a closed spec. They don't really care about all the rest of it.
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Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Summarily, only someone who is (1) a complete idiot, (2) completely incompetent regarding issues of standard, (3) extremely iased, or (4) paid-off, could possibly say crap like, "OOXML is a great standard", or recommend it for approval.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
Cover up? Msft is not even shy about their brazen corruption anymore.
Yes, there was corruption. Tons of it. It has all been very well documented. Read groklaw.net or noooxml.org.
What does msft care is the slashdot/groklaw crowd doesn't like it?
Read it and get back to us if you still have questions.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20080327170359776
"the president of the European Academy for Standardisation, Tineke Egyedi, is critical of OOXML being made a standard when ODF exists already, and she believes duplicative standards conflict with WTO rules"
Not that stuff like rules or laws ever stopped msft.
Others have already read the OOXML docs and pointed out countless places it's incomplete, contradictory and impossible to implement. Worse, it has been pointed out that DOCX is already something different from the above. I have better things to do with my time than read 6000 pages of misdirection. NO ONE but MS is going to have a working implementation, if there can ever be such a thing. OOXML is a farce that will only fool the weakest minded non technical decision makers. It surely did not fool the majority of ISO representatives and we shall see if it really becomes a standard in light of all the irregularities. The organization's reputation is on the line. For prior art in this matter, look up Rich Text Format, the Microsoft last "open" specification that no one ever used.
Rational policy for the new documents is to return the thing to it's sender and ask for ODF. Editors can be had as a free download and they work well, so there's no reason for anyone to demand others buy a $400 text editor. It's that simple, for you and me to work together I can buy a $400 program or you can download one for free. Which do you think it's going to be most of the time?
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=216934&cid=17629948
Microsoft is approving its own "standard", I'd say. We count 20 direct Microsoft participants:
1 BELGIUM Mr. Bruno SCHRODER MICROSOFT
2 BRAZIL Mr. Fernando GEBARA Microsoft Brazil
3 CANADA Mr. Paul COTTON Microsoft Canada
4 COTE D'IVOIRE * Mr. Wemba OPOTA MICROSOFT West and central Africa
5 CZECH REPUBLIC Mr. tepán BECHYNSKÝ Microsoft Czech Republic, Ltd
6 DENMARK Mr. Jasper Hedegaard BOJSEN Microsoft Denmark
7 FINLAND Mr. Kimmo BERGIUS Microsoft Ltd
8 GERMANY Mr. Mario WENDT Microsoft Deutschland GmbH
9 ISRAEL Mr. Shmuel YAIR Microsoft
10 ITALY Ing. Andrea VALBONI Microsoft Italy
11 JAPAN Mr. Naoki ISHIZAKA Microsoft
12 KENYA Mr. Emmanuel BIRECH Microsoft East Africa
13 NEW ZEALAND Mr. Brett ROBERTS Microsoft New Zealand
14 NORWAY Mr. Shahzad Rana Microsoft Norge AS
15 PORTUGAL * Prof. Miguel Sales DIAS MICROSOFT Portugal
16 SWITZERLAND Mr. Marc HOLITSCHER Microsoft Schweiz GmbH
17 UNITED STATES Mr. Doug MAHUGH Microsoft Corporation
18 Ecma International Mr. Brian JONES Microsoft
19 Ecma International * Mr. Jean PAOLI Microsoft Corporation
20 Assistant to Project Editor Mr. Tristan DAVIS Microsoft
Nope, there's no conflict of interest or ethics issues here. I don't know how anybody could think that Microsoft is influencing the ISO standards process.
Banjo - The more I know about Windoze, the more I love *nix
That the OOXML proposed standard is already outdated, because MS Office doesn't use it. If you apply OOXML to a Word Document you'll not get the entire document in it's original format. So, any Archiving of Word documents still won't be retrievable by anything other than the version of Word they were created on. in other words the OOXMl standard is nothing but a big fat lie, because it is not used by any word processor on the planet. A worthless time consuming attempt at a standard that has zero usefulness. But, Microsoft has gotten it's way, again, by hook and crook and just plain old BS. Personally I don't see how they can keep pulling this stuff and getting away with it. It really is amazing how they do it. If they were to apply these skills for good we could probably have World Peace.
Yeah, the problem is that you're only hearing one side of the story.
For example, the meeting in Norway was not to approve or disapprove of OOXML, it was to determine if there had been any irregularities in the Norway vote. As such, only the administrators votes counted towards whether to overturn their previous yes vote to no or abstain.
Since there was no vote to accept or reject OOXML, these stories that claim such are deceptive. I don't believe the authors are deliberately bending the truth, but I think they have bad information and are just repeating it.
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When it comes time to mandate the standard you're going to use, just say it has to be ISO recognised and correctly identify leap years.
That's the MS standard out the window as it thinks 1900 was a leap year.
I've been in city council meetings and other places where people think they have a chance to wield a little influence to make things come out the way they want. It's amazing the lies people tell to each other, and to themselves, to "win" their point. (And you watch, after a few years, they generally find themselves hoist on their own petards.) As long as there are a lot of people who have bought into the "power" model of society, this sort of stuff will go on, because people get their self-images all tangled up in the amount of "power" they can wield.
Someone once said it this way:
And they keep it up while telling themselves that everyone is doing it.
Anyway, as someone pointed out on Groklaw recently, Gates very likely figures he can't lose. Either way, he's put the ISO down, and that makes it that much harder to prove that his software is mathematical snakeoil.
But he's fooling himself if he believes he can hide the power of plaintext from the world forever. It would have been more to his empire's benefit to have let the ODF spec stand unchallenged and simply joined in with software that works (more or less) by that standard. Now, because of the travesty that is OOXML (not to mention Microsoft's primary formats) people will start realizing that it doesn't take filling a file full of formatting (and maybe a precious few semantic tags) to send someone a message asking how the trip to Cancun was, or asking for a quick summary of a committee meeting.
We get what we pay for (at best). I don't know about the rest of you guys, but my work journals and most of the stuff I want to keep forever is now in plaintext with a few ad-hoc semantic tags. (Not even full XML, if I figure I can parse it later with my eyeballs.)
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
The elections there seem to have a parallel with this whole situation.
A few for; many against. The strongest stays in power regardless of what the majority wants.
You miss the point - this all started because various (usually) government bodies in the US and worldwide were starting to worry about how much data they held and distributed in a proprietary file format which was only reliably readable by products from a single vendor. They started passing rules that required public documents to be stored and exchanged in some sort of non-proprietary standard format. Such rules have to be passed by the politicos who aren't capable of assessing the technical merit of a file format - but will respect ISO certification. With ODF as an ISO standard, progress was gradually being made (albeit an uphill struggle the teeth of MS lobbying). This would have been a major breakthrough towards a healthily diverse and competitive market in office software (in which MS could easily become an equal player by simply adding ODF support to Office).
If OOXML gets a ISO certification then non-techie politicos will take this as carte blanche that MS file formats are "open" and can be safely used (and that they can stick with their MS software because there's an "upgrade path" to .docx). This is the "path of least resistance" anyway and such people will be easily convinced that all these rumblings about inconsistencies in the approval process were just sour grapes from penguin-hugging beatnicks.
You don't like Gates or Microsoft? Don't buy their shit.That's the problem with monopolies: they subvert the free market model because lots of people don't have the choice! - MS has such market dominance that everybody assumes that everybody else can read the same file formats. What do you do if someone sends you a MS word file that K/OpenOffice won't render properly? When you send your proposal for a new project to a funder as an ODF file and they say they can't open it, what do you do? Now, currently OpenOffice etc. do a tolerable job of opening .doc files - but that's entirely dependent on the OO programmers being able to keep up every time MS changes the format, and it will only take one patent lawsuit to put an end to that.
Took me four years to find and purchase the right wireless cards I wanted.Q: Why did that take so long? Well, one reason is that because of the Microsoft monopoly wireless chipset manufacturers can hit 95% of the market just by supplying their own low-level windows drivers - and card resellers can (and do) switch chipsets without warning. Someone tells you that the NetSysLink 9000 card is supported by Linux, you buy one and find that NetSysLink 9000 sold in the EU on a Tuesday use a completely different chipset. I've had DVD drives that I've had to plug into a Windows system to set the region code before they'd work in Linux.
Without the "wintel" monoculture, they'd need to publish interface specs, or establish some sort of standardised communications protocol so that various OS vendors could implement drivers.
By your own admission, sticking with Linux has been a labour of love - the vast majority of the desktop computing market simply doesn't have your technical knowledge, let alone persistence.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
Irregularities and political decisions in ISO DIS 29500 March 2008 votes:
Germany
In a steering committee of 20 people a vote was taken to answer this question: "did the process run according to the rules and without irregularities?"
6 answered no and 7 abstained!
http://www.noooxml.org/forum/t-49525/limited-choice-at-german-din http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=2008032913190768
Norway
21 members of the committee voted NO to fast-track this DIS but it was decided to vote yes anyway.
http://www.noooxml.org/forum/t-50031/oil-fire-in-norway-microsoft-buys-another-standards-body
Denmark
The technical committee didn't agree to change the disapproval vote but it was "decided" to vote yes anyway.
The committee S-142/U-34 under Danish Standards could not agree to change their vote from No to Yes.
A couple of hours later:
http://www.version2.dk/artikel/6718 says that the announcement from Danish Standards will not be made until Friday and that the Chair of the committee has been barred from speaking about the result of yesterday's meeting.
After some Microsoft political intervention to revert this ( the Prime Minister of Denmark is a Microsoft friend ), we have this: http://www.en.ds.dk/4227
Another political decision, influenced by Microsoft lobbyists.
Malaysia
The Minister of Science, Technology and Innovation decided on Malaysia's final position on OOXML ("abstain" ), overturning the 81% "Disapprove" position by ISC-G and TC4.
http://www.openmalaysiablog.com/2008/03/the-minister-of.html http://www.openmalaysiablog.com/2008/03/malaysian-indus.html
Poland
On March 20, 2008, Technical Committee (KT 182) of PKN was supposed to either accept the recommendation (which was to vote YES for the proposed standard) or not accept it, and thus recommend PKN to vote NO or abstain from voting. Of 45 members, 24 appeared on the meeting. And the votes looked like this:
No consensus has been achieved concerning the recommendation. Thus, the chairman of KT 182, Elzbieta Andrukiewicz, decided to allow the missing members to vote by e-mail during the next 10 days (till the end of March).
The email vote was taken, counting a "no mail sended" as an "approval" !!!
Clearly, there was no technical consensus in Poland, but the chairman forced the rules to favour an approval.
http://www.noooxml.org/forum/t-49455/polish-chairwoman-distributes-microsoft-propaganda http://polishlinux.org/poland/possible-manipulation-around-ooxml-process-in-poland/ http://polishlinux.org/poland/poland-confirms-its-approval-for-ooxml-in-iso/
Croatia
Out of 35 members of TO Z1, 17 sent a vote, and there were three votes for, and fourteen against fast-tracking OOXML, which is relative rejection rate of 82%. Members who voted were individual experts, IBM, CLUG and HrOpen. However, since there were less than 51% of votes, the voting process was declared invalid, and the previous vote holds ( "approve" ) !
M
"August 30, 2007 (Computerworld) -- Microsoft Corp. admitted Wednesday that an employee at its Swedish subsidiary offered monetary compensation to partners for voting in favor of the Office Open XML document format's approval as an ISO standard."
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9033701
Now tell me that's not corruption.
If people disapprove of Microsoft's standards, then they should NOT USE THEM! PERIOD!!
;-)
Well, that's easy enough to say, but it can be pretty difficult if the "use" is reuired by a government agency with the power to send you to jail if you don't reply properly.
And the whole point of a "standard" like this is to make it legal for government agencies to send you docs in a Microsoft format that you are legally required to read and reply to. Either that, or you hire someone who can read it for you.
I have a few friends that are very busy right about now, because here in the US it's tax season, and their job is helping people do their taxes. They all explain how they hate Microsoft, but they have to use it, because a lot of the government's tax docs and forms are only available now in computer form, and most of them are only in MS formats.
The pretense of most standards agencies is that a standard is open to everyone, and anyone can implement software or other equipment according to the standard. But it's fairly common for standards agencies to rubber-stamp standards that are poorly defined. This is usually done by approving a standard written by "consultant" paid by a corporation, and the actual standard describes something that the corporation sells. This makes it nearly impossible for independents to develop to the standard, because you can't know the obscure details hidden in the big corporation's product. What you have to do is try to reverse-engineer the spec, and you always miss something. Customers inevitably come across cases that your product doesn't handle "correctly" (i.e., exactly the same as the big corporation's products). At that point, you lose all future sales to that customer, because their management decrees buying only the big corporation's products "to prevent similar future compatibility problems".
It's an old story. And the ISO has produced such standards many times. I worked for a few years back in the 1980s on some projects that involved developing ISO networking standards. We were repeatedly hit with proposed revisions to a new standard that made absolutely no sense to any of us. It always turned out that the text was written by people paid by IBM or Microsoft or Cisco or a few other major networking firms. It was clear that unless we could present a logical technical argument against the text, it would be accepted in the standard. And "We don't understand any way to implement it" wasn't a logical argument. (It was merely an admission of our ignorance.
Of course, the resulting confused mess was a lot of why OSI lost out to IP. And most of the corporate "contributions" to OSI were clearly intended as sabotage, since the corporations all wanted their own network rubber-stamped as the standard. They were sorta blindsided by the Internet, which they also didn't own (though they're working on that). But they did succeed in making OSI a standard that nobody much wanted to implement.
The only real news here is the extreme in-your-face arrogance of Microsoft this time around. Usually such problems are kept quiet until it's too late to do anything. But MS seems to feel that they can easily win this one. They may be right. Online discussions in the tech community don't seem to have affected the process very much, and chances are we can't really do anything about it. So we can look forward to a future of working with a poorly-specified standard that we'll never be able to implement correctly. In this case, there will be a big corporation selling software that complies with the standard, though of course "compliance" will be practically defined as working exactly as Microsoft's software does.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.