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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.'"
Or truth or science. A lie is a lie no matter how many people you pay to repeat it. Corruption has no place in any technical organization that will be litened to and respected.
Groklaw predicts more challenges
and notes the results will now be announced on Wednesday, so and ISO standard for M$XML is not going to be one of the worst April Fools jokes of the next decade.No calls now, I'm
"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."
This is why we need open source governance.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source_governance
It's a nice gesture, but it's a lost cause. The ISO has been undermined by Redmond and its agents, and now an unimplementable file format will give Microsoft the highground it needs to peddle its monopoly, to the detriment of anyone interested in a real open file standard.
I leave it to the EU (as the US DoJ clearly has no interest in this any more) to take Microsoft to task, and hopefully empty their coffers a little bit. That seems to be the only thing to be done with Microsoft until the time comes when they're anti-competitive behavior is finally met by government agencies of sufficient power to break the company up.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
What's the point of http://www.gatesfoundation.org/ if it is not to buy good karma for Bill and MS?
Engineering is the art of compromise.
If you want to see how bad was this process handled, see one of its awfuls deliverables.
Open the document "Response_DE-0028_dates_v9.doc" in this zip
http://www.itscj.ipsj.or.jp/sc34/open/0989_reference_docs.zip
This is one of the changes frenetically accepted in BRM, regarding treatments of dates in OOXML. See the salad of colors trying to explain the modifications. And this is a fix ( BRM ) of a fix ( one of ECMA 1027 proposed fixes ) of a NB comment of a draft text ( original ECMA submission ).
And this document contradicts this another BRM document: http://www.itscj.ipsj.or.jp/sc34/open/0989.pdf because the first says that the .DOC file replaces ECMA responses 18 and 43 but the "Response_DE-0028_dates_v9.doc" document says that it replaces ECMA responses 18, 43, 76 and 690 !
ECMA and Microsoft have not provided a final text with all this changes applied. In the BRM they frenetically changed Scope, Conformance , Schemas , and lot of normative text. Microsoft is now rushing to get a final text in less than one month, to comply with ISO normative.
This is how ISO delivers IT international standards, mandating fundamental changes to drafts, leaving national bodies with the only alternative to cast a political vote leaving aside the technical content of the specification.
Congratulations to the countries that had *balls* and didn't agree with this way of deliver standards to people:
And congratulations Microsoft, your friendly little countries supposedly experts in XML document description languages ;-) ( now ISO P-members ), who joined ISO JTC1 just to cast an unconditional-yes-votes payed off:
My 5-year-old kid understands this. I taught her a strong lesson in "no cheating" the other day. Exactly one day later she was making up her own rules. No prompting from me. She loves to win.
As a good parent, I let her. That's the "fair" way to cheat, but I don't let her make them up as she goes like Hillary Clinton and Microsoft. I make sure we agree to the rules before we play.
The ISO should have done the same. I hope Microsoft is up against the wall for this crap.
--
Toro
OK, So Microsoft has most likely gotten OOXML passed as an ISO standard. Unfortunate, but probably true.
Further, it appears that the real reason they did this is so that they can put that all-important checkmark in the box that says, "Interoperates with ISO standard file formats" when trying to sell MS Office into accounts.
OK, great.
Now PROVE IT!
Prove that MS Office is OOXML compliant. Last I heard, OOXML was like Office 2007, but not really there. Last I heard, OOXML was an incomplete spec with no full implementation.
If Microsoft is going to to for that "ISO standard file format" checkbox, for that matter if anyone is going for an ISO standard checkbox, isn't it necessary that there be compliance testing? And long as we're compliance testing, the certification of compliance should NEVER be given until the appropriate committee evaluates the product against the spec and decides that that the product unambiguously implements the spec.
No full, unambiguous compliance, no check in the little box.
No matter how long the evaluation takes.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
> Seriously, ISO should drop all other work and start thinking about some vaguely coherent and transparent voting procedures.
Well, if their current voting procedures are flawed and prone to manipulation by parties with an obvious interest in the outcome, then nothing they produce can really be trusted to be the best practice. Since it undermines everything they do as a standards body, I'd say fixing their voting procedures to eliminate the appearance of impropriety ought to be their top priority.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."