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OOXML Rumored to be Approved, Announcement Wednesday
dominux writes "Rumors are already circulating that Microsoft's OOXML has been voted in by the standards board. The Open Sourcerer claims to have results of the ballot on dis29500. According to the site Microsoft managed to flip enough countries to make it stick. 75% of the P members who didn't abstain voted for Microsoft (That is 58% of all the P members). 14% of all the P and O members voted to disapprove it, this includes all the new O members that joined just in time to cast their vote. Norway has asked that their vote be suspended due to voting irregularities, but it would take more than that to make a difference to the result. ZDNet is still playing it cautious, noting that an announcement either way is set to be made on Wednesday."
"omgponies" tag is needed
this god damn well better be tagged omgponies
This had better be an April Fool's joke.
"Evil will always triumph over good, because good is dumb." - Dark Helmet (Spaceballs)
because nobody would believe it if it was made today.
Your sig(k) has been stolen. There is a puff of smoke!
if this is approved we can safely assume ISO is corrupt.
Honestly, I'm quite surprised. I was rather expecting there to be a big stink over this, but apparently not. Well, it worked for Tom Delay, I guess it should work for Microsoft.
So, ISO got an extremely high profile black eye in the credibility department from which it may never recover. Developers and purchasers who are not able to make their high-level decision makers realize that they shouldn't early-adopt OOXML despite this certification are going to end up being held responsible for the massive clusterfuck that eventuates. Information will become a lot harder to keep organized and accessible in countries that adopt this messy non-spec as a standard, and global productivity will shrink due to the ensuing chaos.
Thanks MS.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
A majority of participants voted for it... Slashdot says we should deny the will of the voters.
It's almost like watching the Democratic primary season in a tiny microcosm.
Microsoft has performed a valuable service without really meaning to.
By demonstrating once and for all how embarassingly corruptible the ISO is, it calls into doubt the validity of many past and future ISO standards, and will force us into a proper re-evaluation of self-appointed standards bodies and the standards they whore around.
For too long we've taken the rather naive view that being an 'open standard' is enough. At last we see the foolishness of that view.
And in this case, I think it's somewhat unfair to judge Microsoft too harshly for wanting to game the system any way they could- what company wouldn't have done in their position?
But it is to ISO's massive, disgusting and probably reputation-destroying shame they they simply laid back and allowed themselves to be corrupted, defiled and sodomised by a large multinational. And they didn't even get a kiss afterwards.
I hope everyone who played their part in this sordid venture has plenty of time to repent at leisure when they realise that the ISO can never, WILL never, be trusted again.
The Microsoft way
(tho' rather funny)
Seems here to stay;
Redmond has money!
Burma Shave
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
The claimed results of the ballot on dis29500 document looks like a blatant forgery to me. For example, the implied claim about the process having been managed by ISO/CS ("Central Secretariat") ist wrong; the process is managed by ISO/IEC ITTF ("Information Technology Task Force"). Also, there is no defined "Voting stage" of "enquiry" in the JTC1 directives, etc etc.
nuff said
WTH is this guy on?
Yes, gentle reader, it's annual "Slashdot is a useless pile of crap" day.
Kriston
It was so much better last year...
Sucks this year. Plus that damn NetApp flash ad keeps covering up the top story on the main page and there's no "close" function...
So can we hope to see Microsoft dismantling it's various monopolistic positions in the near future (voluntarily). I look forward to it.
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
If OOpsyXML is not made a standard, Microsoft has proven how corruptable the ISO is, and they win. They will claim that ODF being an ISO standard means nothing, through corrupt actions they were able to take themselves. It's blaming the victim, but it will work.
If OOpsyXML is approved, then the ISO credibility will actually mean nothing, because the standards is, by all accounts I have seen, utter garbage.
Microsoft has proven, once and for all, that democracy is a failure, even if it is the best failure to date.
--
Toro
spam. No, seriously.
Do away with our corrupt tax code. Support the Fair Tax
Well a few points:
If this is an April fools joke it isn't funny.
If this is real and the (gasp) "standard" was approved, we should all start calling it the "Fools Standard" in everything we write, thus putting the proper "spin" on it.
You know, this is not really the kind of stories that I like to see on April 1st. I do hope it's a DO NOT WANT joke.
It's not just those who voted for the standard that should be admonished, but thsoe coutnries who knew it was a wrong and corrupt process and yet still abstained!
To extend the oft-used rape analogy in the discussions on this topic, these are the bystanders who stood and watched while the rape occured.
I think we need a new icon for ISO stories...a spineless jelly fish might be appropriate...
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
You know, it's being announced tomorrow and its April 1st. Also the opensourcer's numbers don't even remotely add up. Come on folks, you can do better than that for an April fools joke.
Anyway , does it really matter if OOXML is voted for by ISO? Its just XML for heavens sake, what does it matter? Its not like MS will have copyright on it , they WANT other companies and software to use it. Not everything that comes out of Redmond smells bad.
I hope your foolness is limited to April
Dear all,
as you all may be aware we are involved with the ISO/JTC1 SC34 work.
Please find the official results for the ISO vote for OOXML (DIS 29500).
Probably the impact on the adoption of ODF of the OOXML process will be
minimal, but surely there will be some interest from the public around this.
OOXML which was submitted by Microsoft to ECMA, and by ECMA to ISO, has
literally crawled through the needles eye. After a year of discussion
and repairs it still receives the very minimum of support. The BRM
convinced some yet unconvinced others, and counter votes from large
countries like China, India, Brazil, Canada, South Africa and Iran speak
volumes. This must be one of the worst results ever for a standard to
pass within ISO/JTC1 in years.
Appartently the chair from the Norwegian committe has filed a protest
against the national outcome. Although one vote would not make much
difference, others may follow.
Kind regards,
Michiel Leenaars
NLnet foundation
OpenDoc Society board
http://lists.opendocsociety.org/pipermail/members.announce/2008-April/000002.html
Can we please all agree that this is the April fool so that this never happened.
At least until tomorrow ?
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
Oh. Haha. It's funny because it's unlikely..
You just got troll'd!
This whole OOXML ISO Standards thing was just an elaborate April Fool's Joke that Microsoft orchestrated. Man, they really had us going, didn't they?
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Check it out: http://dot.kde.org/20080401/"
Unfortunately, it seems to be true.
I've been tracking this for the last few months, and it's clear that this was essentially a victory of corruption over merits.
What's being said now is that this will be a pyrrhic victory for Microsoft. Many will discredit this standard (even with the ISO stamp on it) because of the history of corruption that lead to its approval. Those who already disliked Microsoft will only hate it even more and become more vocal.
I hope this whole process served to show the world (once again) what "business as usual" means for Microsoft.
MS corruption is rife in the UK, so much so that the greasy-palmed
BSI changed from no to yes on OOXML.
Searching for "corruption" on the BSI site quickly finds
BIP 3018:2004 "Ethics and Anti-Corruption DVD"
http://www.bsi-global.com/en/Shop/Publication-Detail/?pid=000000000030130847,
a snip at £680.85. Status "withdrawn", I wonder why?
So when msft is caught red-handed, like in Norway, or Sweden, then that one particular vote is not counted. But it is assumed that everything else is just fine, in spite of dozen of irregularities?
That doesn't really seem fair to me. It seems like, if you cheat, then you either win, or at least break even. It's like saying that the penalty for shop-lifting is that you have to put the stuff you stold back.
In fact, it seems like, in the case of Norway, msft did better than break even. Instead of a "yes" msft rigged a "nothing" which is better for msft than a "no."
Considering the massive number of irregularities in the OOXML approval process, I think OOXML approval should be put on hold, until an investigation can be completed.
it is genuine btw. We did a rather lame April Fools version just before we got the real deal. http://www.theopensourcerer.com/2008/04/01/ooxml-fails-iso-approval/ we are not clever enough to do an acknowledged AF followed by an elaborate hoax. So what numbers don't add up?
This is not necessarily a bad thing. If it's standardized, Microsoft might be motivated to finally come up with a product that actually implements the whole thing.
In Norway, a majority voted OOXML. Yes msft shills on slashdot think that should be a "yes" vote.
Unfortunately to Microsoft discrediting ISO would be a bonus. If there are no reliable standards bodies then it just wakens the position of people trying to argue the advantage of standards compliance. For MS the best outcome would be that people would say "standards mean nothing anyway", because the alternative to de facto standards are de jura - and Microsoft sets most of these.
Why?
All they have to do is implement more than everyone else, then change the "standard" so that others are not compatible.
it calls into doubt the validity of many past and future ISO standards
Including ODF, so now we just go back to the situation we had before all of this ISO standard document talk, back to MS Office again. What has changed? Oh right, nothing, which is pretty much what MS's goal was in all of this. They win either way.
Twinstiq, game news
All I can I say "who cares?".
..... err... what else reads ooxml? oh thats right nothing, we'll have to wait for office 2010"... Or even better (assuming what most people are saying is correct about ms word not even saving according to the standard). "wow, KOffice just realised their OOXML plugin, lets take a look - hmmm, this looks nothing like what i saved, and documents i saved in OOXML format in Koffice dont look right in MS Word either" (or even better, "but documents i saved in KOffice do look right in MS word"). The response "we coded our plugin according to the ISO standard", but of course, then everyone else codes according to the standard and the only one that looks wrong is MS Office - not a compelling argument for MS office is it?
I know next to nothing about how iso standards go, and I suspect there are many people out there making comment (the vast majority) that know about as much as I do.
In all likely hood the guys at ISO central are sitting there laughing at each other going "hahahha, the IT crowd really got their knickers in a knot over this? they think this one was irregular, they should have seen ISO9004!". But they most likely have their hands fairly well tied too, the votes are in and they probably cant do much about the (supposedly) obvious corruption of the process.. or can they? What power do they have? I certainly don't know myself...
But look at it from another angle, what does it really mean? The whole purpose of standardizing the format (as i understand it) was so that documents could be accessed at any point in the future (and by other applications) without loosing their content and formatting. How does OOXML achieve this in reality? how do you test that theory? With ODF at least you can say, "ok, i just saved a document in ODF from MS word using sun's plugin and opened it up in Sun Star office - wow it prints and looks the same", but thats not case closed because you need to try that again in 10 years and confirm the theory. Try that again with OOXML - "ok, i just saved an OOXML from ms word, now lets open it up in
In a way, MS could very well shoot themselves in the foot if they have 10 other office product vendors with the same ooxml implementation that looks wrong only in MS office...
Another thing to consider - Would OOXML being a standard kill ODF? No, ODF still exists and in reality alot of people round the world are already using it - ironically they're probably mostly using it from MS Office anyway because of Sun's ODF plugin. Which brings me to the next point, if OOXML wasn't a standard does it release the strangehold of MS office? no, Sun did all the dirty work providing ODF import/export for MS office already.
The only real problem that exists is when governments of the world (who fell into the trap of ooxml) realize that the MS Office written OOXML documents will only ever open again in MS office properly (hi, welcome to vendor lock-in, sit back, relax and enjoy the ride - oh and by the way, office 2010's OOXML implementation will be slighly different, so hang onto the old hardware cause your going to need it so you can keep office 2007 around). At the end of the day it just gives various bodies the world over a comfy feeling they can stick with MS office anyway and save in its native format (and perhaps point fingers at someone else when it goes wrong). When it comes to "oh, KOffice cant open OOXML the same way MS can", KOffice will get blamed but thats why MS have tonnes of money for pulling off stunts like this no?
Obviously im ignoring things like third party applications that dont open documents for word processing, but things like Google Search appliance wont record documents with a proper formatting and thus MS search will look "right" - and again, this will benefit MS (and there will be many applications in many field that will probably suffer something because of it).
Maybe the EU should have taken MS's 3.1bil and bought their own votes on the ISO committee's just for a bit of poetic justice (or
Thanks on the correction, I didn't see all the last minute magic approvals that hadn't been updated on the malaysiablog yet.
...DoinItLikeWord95DoesIt.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
The new ISO standard ISO/IEC 29500 allows the assessment of corruption in countries, organizations and individuals based on a dual-logarithmic scale which correlates potential and de-facto corruption to optimise investment for multinationals.
Gabriel Garter of ISO comments, "We are very proud to launch this latest international standard, which is now ready for deployment. This was a global effort which required the help of organisations and individuals with years of experience in achieving corruption to finally allow us to provide this valuable service to the market."
ECMA International, the leading standardization organization in this field adds, "We were glad that years of expertise at forcing low-quality technical documentation through ISO for certification with minimum modification proved to be so useful for this new international standard."
Microsoft, the world's largest software company comments, "Microsoft is glad that we could be of use to this project. Over the years we have assembled a valuable compendium of in-house knowledge about various corruption techniques. While these techniques constitute our intellectual property and we would pursue method-piracy to the full extent of the law, we will be offering a licensing program with reduced fees for all Microsoft Gold Partners who participated in the project."
"Our special thanks and gratitude go to Jan van der Beld, whose tireless efforts to selfishly spread corruption have been our source of inspiration," concludes Garter. "In honor of his work, we decided to introduce a special motto for this new international standard. The phrase 'You are well paid. Shut up!' will be printed in bold on the header of every page of ISO/IEC 29500, quoting Mr van den Belds most inspiring speech available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wITyO71Et6g."
On Groklaw we learned today that Hewlett Packard participated in overt political interference along side Microsoft
"Here's the scoop from Les Echos.fr on France's sudden change from its No vote to Abstain. Microsoft France's President Eric Boustouller sent AFNOR a letter [PDF] in French, of course. He tells a tale about OOXML and ODF progressing side by side and how if OOXML is approved, a group will be working hard to make the two more interoperable. Attached was a HP statement of support for OOXML. HP sings the same song. And AFNOR?"
Take a look at HP's Ethics and Compliance Page and you will see how concerned HP is of public perceptions after recent events connected with HP's investigation into leaks of confidential information from the Board of Directors tarnished HP's reputation in this area.
HP tells us they have a long-standing commitment to conducting business with uncompromising integrity, which is core to everything they stand for as a company. I am sure that if they really understood that by supporting MSOOXML they are headed for another scandal, they would distance themselves from OOXML. Even more, since their ambition is to provide a leadership role in corporate ethics, they would help to turn the tide against OOXML.
In light of this, you may wish to help them understand the errors presented by the "HP Position Statement on Standardization of Office Document Formats" and you may comment directly to their Board of Ethics on the Comments page. That is where I just posted the following letter...
Dear members of the Board of Ethics and Compliance at HP
It is clear that your company is deeply concerned about conducting business with uncompromising integrity. In light of your commitment to being a leader in global citizenship and corporate ethics, I wish to direct your attention to a serious error in judgment by somebody there at HP who formulated the "HP Position Statement on Standardization of Office Document Formats".
I refer to the following statements...
"HP believes that the international standardization process is working."
It is now blatantly obvious that quite the contrary is true, specifically, that the standardization process was seriously flawed. Please see the current discussion on Groklaw about this at http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20080331212042460#c684749 and you will quickly realize that your statement is a serious error.
"additional evolution of it will take place under control of the global community"
...another error - in no way whatsoever could we conclude that the decision for MSOOXML to become an ISO standard was made by the "global community". I believe that decision was made by Microsoft and its partners who overwhelmed the ISO voting process, and AFAIK, additional evolution will be done by ECMA, who is controlled by Microsoft.
"Hewlett-Packard Company ...believe[s] that the two standards will co-exist interoperably, and that customers should have the opportunity to select the standards which best fit their needs."
The phrase boggles the mind when you try to parse it. Let us imagine that the two standards, MSOOXML and ODF are interoperable - then why would we need both? Why would the end user choose one over the other if they both do the same job? Interoperability implies that we could easily convert from one to the other. If this were possible, than that in itself is a demonstration that MSOOXML is a duplication of an existing standard - ODF - and therefore should not be/have been approved.
...and if they do
there will be condemnation.
there will be appeals.
and like a jumper that has been badly washed, the ISO system will never be the same. trust takes a long time to build, but can be destroyed in an instant.
groklaw did a superb (as normal) run down on the appeals process, and this will be so inevitably roundly condemned that an appeal will almost certainly happen.
but really I'm quite OK about this being voted in, I always predicted a Pyhrric victory for MS. Here's my logic - if they did not manage to force this through then they lost. But they did manage to force it through and in the process created such scrutiny, condemnation, criticisms of OOXML and contempt from the industry that they still lost. OOXML is widely regarded as a flawed, massive, unimplementable standard, an evolved jumble of legacy components with little clarity. It will be fascinating to see if any other implementation will ever be implemented. Already moves are underway to specify cross platform implementations as required for many, many governments - and I think we can all see where that leaves MS.
Even if another portable implementation is ever implemented, then once again MS loses as their cash cow is no longer required on the corporate desktop.
I mourn for a once respected standards body, of course. But I think ISO has allowed this to happen to itself - it has lost its impartiality and technical clarity and I do not know where the future lies for it. In in ideal world only technical merit should of won out, and only one standard should ever of been introduced to meet a this requirement. If OOXML was demonstrably better then ODF should of been deprecated.
Just my 2 cents.
Guys, this is an April Fools joke! Here is the real story, basing on the Jason Matusow's blog post from today: Microsoft admits manipulation, abandons OOXML.
Polish your GNU/Linux! http://polishlinux.org
Raping another being is a forceful, violent assault (otherwise it's just kinky sex). I somehow doubt MS was holding a gun to anyone's head. No, this is simply due to greed and spinelessness.
No sig for you!!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
"Many will discredit this standard (even with the ISO stamp on it) because of the history of corruption that lead to its approval."
Works out perfectly since nobody in their right mind will bother to attempt to implement it, nobody in their right mind will consciously adopt it, so now, Microsoft can just embraceextendandextinguish it.
Research shows that 67% of those who use the term "research shows", are just making shit up.
You silly creature, the goal was never to "make sure documents are readable in the future". The goal was to attack Microsoft on what the community thought was 'a sure thing'. But they were wrong so now they will say that the whole thing is meaningless.
As usual, when people vote with the Microsoft haters, it's good... but when they vote in favor of Microsoft, it must be corrupt.
Everyone needs to take a deep breath, and maybe step into some fresh air, go for a walk, have lunch with a friend. When an overwhelming hatred of all things Microsoft defines you as a person, there's something very wrong going on in your life.
The fact is, most organizations (generally the ones doing important work) prefer Microsoft. Now if you guys want to compete in that arena, you need to start doing things that work, and stop doing the things which don't work. The FOSSie "solution" of whining and crying? That's a pretty big failure. The FOSSie "solution" of claiming that Microsoft is brainwashing millions upon millions of people to use their products? Yeah, that's a huge failure as well. So is thinking that because your product is free somehow means it's better- software is better when it's better, not because it's free.
Nobody uses, or even cares about, non-MS office suites. This whole "OMG Document portability!!11!!" concept? That's not a consumer-driven idea. Much like the web standards "issue", the consumer doesn't care. The consumer just wants software which works, which is reliable, which has features they can use to make their jobs easier. That's not something Open Source concerns itself with, nor will it ever do so (aside from very isolated exceptions). FOSS is like perpetually using beta-level software: it's not something a person who values security, stability, or support will ever choose.
As far as OOXML goes, if MS doesn't have an approved doc standard, nobody is going to care about it. It's really that simple. And this may be hard for the Stallmanistas to understand, but MS is not going to allow a group external to Microsoft to dictate how it does things... unless that external group is it's customers.
Windows PROPRIETARY formats, of course. By virtue of its illegal desktop MONOPOLY what ever format Microsoft rolls out for any file automatically becomes the default "standard", no voting or user approval necessary, even IF everyone else has to pay to use it, which they will.
Nice way to neutralize all competition, too.
I have little doubt that this was the plan all along.
All they had to do was to grea$e as few wheel$, both corporate and political, and the deal was done, just the way Al Capone greased the Police, Judges and politicians of Chicago.
So, folks, you'll soon find out how painful it will be to live in a "Chicago-style" PC environment where Steve "Big Al" Ballmer calls all the shots.
Don't worry, he'll set up soup-lines for all you starving programmers out there, just the way Al Capone setup up soup-lines for, and gave small, trival jobs to Chicagoans, as long as they didn't complain about his illegal activities or the shoddy quality of his alcohol.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
I have the ISO-issued PDF here. It is true. Everyone in the national bodies who are members of JTC 1 should be receiving it soon, if they haven't done so already.
It is available on ISO Livelink (account on ISO required, URL is non-public and I won't disclose it).
The number of YES votes without comments shows just how much some countries standard bodies can be trusted (i.e. not at all). It is a nice list of who is up to sell votes for a price. The ones with YES votes with comments (which ARE useless) at least tried to do some work. NO votes without comments are impossible.
Time to add these money whores (YES votes without comments) to the blacklists, and preemptively neutralize them when possible, since we can be sure they are P-members only when paid to vote for one side or the other.
Anyway, from their site, the cause of the suspenstion is,
And Core R is,
Comment removed based on user account deletion
While everyone here is shouting "omg oh noes, teh microsoft ruinz teh ISOs!!! ISO suckz becoz microsoft is teh shit!", I cant see anybody summarizing the REAL motives and issues behind the whole OOXML controversy. And by real motives I mean "Anti-Microsoft people dont want Microsoft to obtain a public international standard on documents, so Office sinks (and Microsoft gets screwed) when governments start pushing restrictions on formats for their documents".
Lots of websites and groups were founded for the sole purpose of politically-motivated bashing of OOXML, while pretending to be about technical issues. A lot of people are complaining about small omissions related to optional behaviours such as Word 97 wrapping emulation and such.
Seriously, look at Wikipedias summary on "technical criticism". Out of 5 mentioned "technical criticism" items, two are just silly complaints about not using W3C formats, the last one is not even a complaint or issue, and the other two are valid questions, but small details that can be changed or ignored.
There are no real technichal issues that exclude OOXML from the class of standards that can be accepted by big standard comitee. A lot of people have tried to comment on this issue, even famous OSS developers, and they all received strong criticisms from the zealots that are fighting what is actually a holy crusade against OOXML, and not a valid technical opposition to a standard.
Is it time to admit that most people are against OOXML mostly because they hate Microsoft, and they want the standard to be denied so it might help Open Office and others, and not because they actually read the spec or analysed it. It is time for people to stop pretending that they're fighting for "purity on the standards process" and admit they they're just fighting for their own political interests. They're not mad because they're actually worried about the technical issues of the spec, but they're pissed off because this situation was a good opportunity to screw-up things for Microsoft.
This whole process has NOT turned ISO into an useless standards body and nobody except from geeky OSS zealots care about this. All engineers and big companies that rely on ISO for a lot of things will not change their minds about the institution. This is just about a bunch of grown-up babies crying and shouting.
Released
http://www.ecma-international.org/news/TC45_current_work/ISO_and_IEC_approve_Office_Open_XML.htm
Comment removed based on user account deletion
s/fundemental/fundamental
In other news, astrophysicists have announced that they now know what all that dark matter is: it's stupidity.
About the corruption - how about Microsoft Sweden and buying of votes?
This is becoming a /. favorite untrue fact. The whole story is: an MS employee wrote an email to two Swedish partner vendors which made it appear that MS would in some way reimburse them for the $2500 cost of joining the Swedish National Body (NB). Within hours Microsoft realized that the phrasing of that mail looked bad, and wrote again to the partner vendors, rescinding any perceived offer and being clear to say that MS would not be paying them in any way to join the NB. MS themselves then reported this gaffe to the Swedish NB. It's very possible that no one would ever have known about the incident if MS had not taken it upon themselves to say (essentially) 'We did this thing. It wasn't our intention to subvert the process, and we have corrected our error, but we want you to be aware of what happened because we know that it could look bad.'
In the end, Sweden's NB invalidated its own vote for different reasons altogether. Even PJ at Groklaw more or less dismissed what otherwise would have been the kind of juicy tidbit she loves to trumpet.
> If this is an April fools joke it isn't funny.
:(
Let's put it this way. When I submitted an April Fools joke on this story (which was not accepted), I wrote that the ISO *REJECTED* OOXML and had a spokesman saying that people should have more faith in the standards process, because there's no way they would let a standard this bad just pass through.
Alas, the real joke will come tomorrow, when this story is confirmed
... when you've stuff the board that made the decisions.
I'm pretty sure (I'd have to check the groklaw archives) that the board that decided to fast-track it was also filled with MS sponsored people. That is, MS was influencing the entire process from the get-go, INCLUDING the decision to have it fast-tracked.
I'm hazy on the details, but there was an outcry about how the decision to fast-track the standard was made.
Perhaps someone who knows the links offhand can post them here. It is still blaming the victim when the victim was abused from the get-go.
We would have no so-called ANSI C. MSFT's "Open Taxpayer's Compatible C Library" would have become ANSI standard, as well as a subset of some ISO standard. It would come in the form of some Windowns PE binary .dll or .lib files, which, according to the spec, is Windows 95 compatible. <windows.h>, which would be part of the standard headers, had been written in an encrypted binary format that only MS Visual C++ preprocessor could read. Linux and gcc would have died since they fail to link with the MS C, which is used in all bussiness apps, schools, CS department of universities. All copies of K&R would have been burned.
The entire history before the rise of M$ has been re-written and approved as an ISO standard. Charles Babbage, Alan Turing and Jonny von Neumann would have not existed. William "The Borg" Gates is the founder of Computer Science. Slashdot is running C# since there's no Perl. Perl has not ever existed.
As for me, I would be quietly sitting in front of my node in a computer lab, hacking my .emacs file in my idle time, as usual.
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
Apparantly I was wrong - I now have (as I am a technical committee member) received a copy of this through the official standardization organization channel with a genuine-looking cover letter from ISO/CS.
So... I guess it's shipping, then?
In my comments above, please substitute DIS29500 where I had mistakenly typed DIS2900 (referring to the OOXML spec as it exists within the ISO process). Sorry about that.