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Norway's Yes-To-OOXML Is Formally Protested
An anonymous reader writes "Norway's yes-to-OOXML may tip the vote in favor of accepting it as an ISO-standard, but the committee chairman just faxed a formal protest to the ISO. 'I am writing to you in my capacity as Chairman (of 13 years standing) of the Norwegian mirror committee to ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 34. I wish to inform you of serious irregularities in connection with the Norwegian vote on ISO/IEC DIS 29500 (Office Open XML) and to lodge a formal protest. You will have been notified that Norway voted to approve OOXML in this ballot. This decision does not reflect the view of the vast majority of the Norwegian committee, 80% of which was against changing Norway's vote from No with comments to Yes.'"
The point of an ISO standard is that multiple organizations can implement it.
In this case only Microsoft can possibly implement it, because various sections refer to proprietary MS software and basically say "do it like that".
Since only Microsoft knows what that actually means, nobody else can implement it. Therefore it is worthless as a "standard".
Norway and the other Nordic countries, however, are consistenly rated as having the lowest corruption in the world. Here is one example of such a ranking.
Even if OOXML becomes an ISO standard, that doesn't mean we're obligated to use it. For one thing, it won't be the only ISO standard for documents: we already have ODF. For another, ISO certification still will not make it an open standard. Governments and other organizations that require documents to conform to an open standard will still have to use ODF, not OOXML. We need to continue pressure for the use of open standards and to refuse to use OOXML ourselves.
It helps lower his taxes in the US.
ISO has been dead to me since the C99 standard was published. They changed virtually nothing from the draft even though there was a vast outpouring of bile from the community when the draft was published. Now it is almost 10 years later and there are still no C99 compliant compilers. The most compliant compiler is gcc in c99 mode which isn't the default mode, even though the C89 standard is officially deprecated.
Of course, it's not really possible to write a C99 compliant compiler as the the standard mandates behavior that is sometimes either completely impossible or just completely undesirable.
How we know is more important than what we know.
It also matters when governments start imposing standards-compliance on themselves. For a brief moment, we had hoped that we'd be able to get government documents in a reasonably standard format (ODF) -- that is, I think, why this is actually a big deal.
I'd argue that's actually a good thing, if and only if said implementation is at least as free/open as the standard itself. No spec can capture every single quirk of a real live piece of software, and in case we discover two alternate implementations which both fit the spec, it would be nice to be able to say which is correct.
That's not originally my idea, but I can't remember where I heard it first.
But for large parts of the spec to basically say "Whatever MS Office does" -- or, actually, "Whatever a particular piece of extinct proprietary software does" -- that seems pretty unacceptable in a spec which is meant to define the now and future standard, rather than simply document (partially) what a particular implementation is going to do anyway.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
And perhaps that's why even Microsoft has said that they're not going to use OOXML as defined (to the extent that you can call it "defined") by the standard.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
I didnt RTFA so im not sure what is going on in Norway so im just guessing that it was somewhat similar issue as in Finland.
Majority of board was against OOXML Standard but in the end, board's decision was "yes". Why ? Board consists of big businesses, government and some other groups. 3 of the bigger companies in the board where IBM, Sun & Google and their votes where not counted because "they would vote as their head offices dictate" and thus the overall voting results from "absolutely no" where turned into "yes with clauses".
Yey!
yush