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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.
It sounds like Europe is getting a taste of how the election process works in the U S of A.
The International Standards Organization has rebranded itself as MS.ISO, and is making itself available for vote tabulation in the Russian Federation, Venezuela, Zimbabwe and Broward County.
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:
If you can't win, simply get the rules of the game changed. Lawyers and politicians understand this. Nerds don't.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Be glad, at least someone blew the whistle. How many votes from other nations do you think could be somehow influenced and nothing done about it? Yeah yeah I'll grab my tinfoil hat :-p
If you are about to mod me down, keep in mind that this post was most likely sarcastic.
People will still choose MS Office because they like it, not because it does or does not save documents in a government mandated open specification. Microsoft could simply add a new "Save As" filter following the Open Specification.
There are certain government regulations about acceptable file specifications. This is to preserve interoperability, facilitate competition between vendors, and to guarantee accessibility in one or two hundred years.
By getting this sham declared a "standard," they can continue to sell to certain government agencies, who can continue to produce docs that are only readable on proprietary Microsoft software and platforms.
Microsoft could most definitely offer a valid save-as file filter to create ODF documents. But it is in their best financial interest to retain user lock-in as much as possible. Ironically, this is exactly the sort of thing that standards bodies like the ISO are supposed to prevent. If this goes through, one must seriously reconsider the weight attached to an ISO certification.
The ______ Agenda
So it's all down to Scandinavia again. Send in Eric the Swift, Olaf the Stout and Baleog the fierce. They should be able to sort this puzzle out.
;^)
I think Linus should go over there and kick some ass, too.
--
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.
But, with all due respect, I think that your perception of free speech isn't entirely right either. Free speech doesn't mean freedom from criticism! Nor does free speech mean--as you say--that others have to listen to you.
Free speech means exactly what it says--say what you want to say! It doesn't ensure that anyone has to listen to you, has to agree, or has to care.
"Your duty is to assist others"
This Reuters article is, technically speaking, utter rubbish.
It's Office Open, stupid. (Albeit not open).
Only by Sun Microsystems ...?
Whattt? ODF is an accepted ISO standard for office documents. To convert it to utter rubbish, you need a converter (like OpenOffice.org), stupid.
First, you need a converter here, too. Second, Microsoft does not support ODF up to now, therefore I'm wondering when MS Office "made it possible to do so" ... Perhaps later? No, never, if OOXML gets accepted by ISO.