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ISO Approves OOXML
sTeF writes in, with the hope that this is an April Fools joke. Doesn't look like it though. An article up at Intellectual Property Watch claims they have obtained a document (PDF) enumerating the vote after Microsoft's OOXML won ISO standard status.
Microsofts statement hailed the appearance of extremely broad support for the standard at the end of the ISO voting process.
Broad? I think they mispelled bold faced fraud.
However, how valid are those votes? For example, the ISO/IEC JTC1 directives seem to pretty explicitly forbid changing the vote from "disapprove" to "abstain" like AFNOR (the French standardization organization) did (under the influence of heavy lobbying from Microsoft and HP).
Ye Who Code This Standard!
I'd let the ISO nestle it's balls in my mouth.
I have enormous balls
I think we all expected MSFT's chicanery to work in the short-term.
But witness that recent brand-awareness survey- As understanding of the computer world seeps into mainstream conciousness, MSFT's rotten practices are coming back to haunt them.
Let's hope that the mainstream media picks up on the insanely obvious corruption involved here, and the Streisand Effect kicks in.
I don't think this is the best outcome for open/free standards, but it should still be viewed as a win, long-term.
"Be light, stinging, insolent and melancholy"
I've had so many clients asking if I can scrape data from their legacy lockinware. Now I can confidently say "Yes" and bill them for the 1400 hours it takes to read this spec.
Thank you MS!
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
and what to avoid. and no, im not a bigoted fanboi of any camp - im just reflecting upon the series of stunts ms pulled to get that format validated. judging from the level they lowered themselves in dirty work to get this through with bribing and manipulating, i'd say that their format has to be total crap. else it wouldnt need that level of filthy campaigning.
Read radical news here
was to retroactively standardize 20 years of legacy document formats. All MS-OOXML really is is a forwards-compatible XML serialization of the Microsoft Office 2003 formats.
And yes, many at Microsoft do consider the whole standardization process to be a sham. (I know, because I work there.)
And with that - the "standards body" of ISO was effectively taken down. FUD shovelers everywhere will begin the slow, purposeful targeting of Government, school and corporations to use MS's products for long-term archival concepts.
/. comments down here?
Perhaps with only gnashing of teeth from the geek side, initially. After some time, say 3 or 4 product cycles, MS's formats, content and programs will have slipped into breaking changes - with various patches, pieces, conversion tools and sunsets. Then and only then, will the true colors of MS's saletroopers, who overrule the tech side, be shown. But you know this - why else would you be trawling the
In other news, the business of writing code to munge data from old MS formats into new MS formats is alive and well. Programmers rejoice! There is an endless market of chagrined middle managers who are willing to port old crap to new crap for good $/hour.
Assuming it's not a joke... Anyone using this standard for anything deserves a punch in the face.
Its the Pyhrric victory to end all.
(1) if they lost the ISO process then they lost
(2) they won the ISO process then they lost as it forced a deep examination of the standard, and raised critical questions and caused them more problems then it solved.
(3) if nobody else implements this flawed standard then they lose as some Goverments are now also specifying cross platform implementation as well as open standard (perhaps in response to this mess)
(4) if (and this is real unlikely) there are other implementations of this standard (eg OO) then they lose as MS Office is no longer required to be ubiquitous on the desktop
This is NOT really a win for MS the way that I see it. They can spin this how they want and surely get away with it for a large amount of the population - but big business and govermental contracts (where the real money is) are already looking for an escape from propietry formats and have been for a while.
I'm really fucked off about the perversion of the ISO system, the bad practice, the lack of any "technology morals" in decisions that needed to be unbiased. But I am not that upset about OOXML being passed - I really do not think MS has won this one.
The important thing to watch now is how MS spins this and where the important money goes (big contracts, goverment).
The referenced comments from the NBs are .doc files. If ISO mandates the use of MS Word .doc files is its existing internal processes what hope that anything other this result?
Is the tag part of the ISO approved spec?
There is no April Fools today since the real news is comical enough (though in a tragically funny sort of way).
Similar to the upcoming US election results
* Microsoft's own Open Office XML (OOXML) format is now an ISO standard. This means anyone with software capable of reading OOXML can can read your documents.
Translation:
* Whilst OOXML is an ISO standard now, we still own the patents and the right to sue anyone who implements it (even if we issued a covenant not to sue; covenants mean nothing to Microsoft, just to let you know). Lastly, OOXML is open however we are only ones who know how to read the blob (binary) parts of the standard perfectly and no one else can.
Internal document at Microsoft:
* Finally we have an ISO and ECMA standard, just so we can say to you that we care about the future of digital documents, when we really just want more money. Saying OOXML is an ISO standard is a great way to have businesses automatically approve of our standard. And now we can put ODF and its hopes and dreams in the dark.
---
I am very disappointed in ISO, OSI, and ECMA. I held them with high regard, until they started approving standards and licences of a company that has been holding back the PC industry all to make a little more money. I will ignore the three bodies for now, until they withdraw their positions on these Microsoft entities.
When will MIPS-based-CPU desktops running Linux at high speeds (much faster than any x86 at the same clocked speed) take over the home PC market? x86 and even x86-64 are dying faster than we can count in my opinion the way things are going.
---
(Written on Gentoo Linux 2.6.24.3 AMD64, Mozilla Firefox 2.0.13, KDE 3.5.8)
You are right about the size of the market but wrong about how much money it will make you and what tools to use. Sun and IBM will give you PDF of ODF output and a handy database system to keep it all. So can anyone else with Open Office. Some people are going to be automating the process better than others but it's going to be a competitive market. That's the whole point of standards, to avoid the massive cost of reinventing what should be obvious and spend resources on things people actually want. MSXML is going nowhere in a market like that.
No calls now, I'm
...find it ironic that the document describing OOXML's ISO adoption is in PDF format?
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Yikes. I like Office 2007 but it is a pain in the ass to teach people to use. Banners? Really? No File Menu? WTF MATE!!! Believe me, Open Office is going to get my vote when it comes time to upgrade here.
... still be hung over (t'was a bad night to have a few drinks with the guys - totally forgot it as 4/1)
The only thing running through my mind is:
what.
the.
hell?
Office Open XML Officially Approved As International Standard Hmmm
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of cats. MEOW!!
corruption, fraud, sellouts, themorethingschangethemoretheystaythesame, hopeitisajoke, itsatrap, Micro$oft$ucks, OOXMLisafraud, confusedvoters, bureaucraticbungling, flipfloppers ... I could go on.
I think the best approach to this is to:
(a) Require MS to be true to their own standard (or immediately fall foul of anti-monopoly rules - hello EU)
(b) Ensure every procurement decision in favour of MS because of this to REQUIRE to implement MSOOXML as well. No point using it for criteria otherwise.
That way I give it a month before reality hits. And less than that for the EU to collar the b*stards again, and this time it won't be a baby fine because that has proven not to have too much of an effect. A cute punishment would be making ODF compliance mandatory in the EU. Given that they haven't implemented a proper filter this may completely nuke the franchise. And without the Office franchise there isn't much left of MS because brute forcing people into an upgrade to something as bad as Vista hasn't exactly worked out too well. Couple that with sub prime problems and companies as well as end users may start to seek for more economic ways to spend their money.
This story is FAR from over.
Insert
in the path of other well respected and used ISO IT standards, like OSI and CMIP.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
:(
I hate it when Microsoft makes things its bitch. And I liked the ISO, too...
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
I noticed that some of the links in the PDF document do not work, presumably because the file has been re-hosted on a third party's server.
I bet this would not have happened if ISO had distributed the memorandum in an ISO-approved document format.
Of all (or most) of the reasons for not liking the MS OOXL file, I oppose it the most because what if 5 or 10 years down the road with a new Office version, they decide to change the format. With this supposed "standard" we might all have to convert our documents. Locking your work in this format is also bad news if you want to retrieve it later. At least the folks at Wordperfect were kind enough to not have changed the format since the 5.x release.
I've decided to use LaTeX to make a final copy of my documents in PDF format after writing up the document w/o markup in Text or RTF document. I'm new to using it, but the markup for most of my purposes is as easy as HTML (I don't use tables or math very much). Its too bad others don't know how easy it is (esp. with templates you can download).
Some of my files are 10 years old and I've archived them all pretty well. But if I use a current version of Word to open it up, the formatting is all screwy. All the more reason to change.
Doesn't the old cliche of "the great thing about standards is there are so many to choose from" apply here? Or does this mean a ton of people will now be forced to use it and Microsoft will reap the benefits?
Sorry, but every article I read about OOXML is about the voting and standardization irregularities, and nothing I've found reviews OOXML from the users standpoint, or implications of it being ISO-ed...
It should be but I still get retard strong mother f-ers who send me .dotx file which cannot be opened even if you have the office compatability pack for Office 2003 Pro. Why they try to email me a template is beyond comprehension but they still find a way to do it.
And this after buying votes, bullying people and several miscounts and rewriting of the rules. They finally got their way... I mean won by a broad margin.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
Microsoft buys ISO certification; World looks on with drool on its face
Standards should be as brief, accurate and stable as possible, in order to be able to cost effectively apply them. This is just a sickening M$=B$ marketing exercise.
At least in Australia it looks like OOXML is dead http://www.standards.org.au/downloads/080331_Aust_maintains_abstain_position_on_OOXML.pdf as it has been rejected by the Australian Government.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
If this is indeed true (and not an April Fools joke), then ISO's time is gone, as they have proven that they are no longer a standards body and instead are "open to the highest bidder". This means a replacement is needed. I propose something run by the community (preferably involving the Free Software Foundation)...this would kind of be a return to the days when standards were formed by posting RFC's on websites.
But if this is true, then no reputable organization will ever seek ISO approval for a standard again.
I reply with "uh...what the heck did you just send me? Please send me that in a standard format like .odf" Even though I CAN use .doc files thanks to OpenOffice, I never advertise this fact. This reply will not change no matter what the entity formerly known as ISO says.
Using "M$" instead of Microsoft makes you look like a seething idiot.
I put a Get OpenOffice button on my website. That may not be much but still too many people use m$ word just because they don't know ooffice exists. So a marketing campaign can help the same way it did for firefox.
Even the KDE foundation voted for it !!!
When his defense asked, "Which computer has Jon Johansen trespassed upon?" the answer was: "His own."
See the story:
An article up at Intellectual Property Watch claims they have obtained a document (PDF)
See the article linked is "PDF"? Why? It is supported on everything down to Symbian S60 handsets and any open source software can support it. People can even race with vendors "reader" software making better ones. That is a real standard which won its place without dirty tricks.
I bet usual suspects like Novell and their mighty Mono/Silverlight innovator Icaza will come up with a thing that supports it to some extent, advertise it and MS will use it as a proof.
Last question: Did gnome people openly critised this decision? On their website?
April 1 could be the end of ISO. Once you lose credibility, you don't get it back. It is not a April 1 joke either. You can even feel that one of the biggest IT scandals is waiting and this time it is not poor open source geeks anymore, it is IBM/Sun and GNU/BSD and various World governments especially those very rich ones who can even say "no" to EU. Don't forget the militaries either.
Well, that'd work if it weren't for tech specs that include "Wraplineslikeword95." As soon as you can tell me what the heck that means, then I'll make you a converter.
Then there's the whole issue that nobody has implemented the standard the ISO passed, not even Microsoft. So we have no way of telling if it's even possible from them, let alone anyone who doesn't have access to the 18 or so patents they have covering OOXML.
Approval was not won, approval was purchased.
M$ M$ M$ M$!!!!
Ha ha ha ha ha. Aww I hurt your feelings by insulting your beloved Microsoft.
Really, that predictable result from the fanboys every time somebody says M$ really shows that they are hurt by this. I notice nobody seems to say anything if somebody writes "microsucks" or "winblows". But gosh, if you put that dollar sign in, they act like their mother has been insulted! Awww, boo hoo!
M$ M$ M$ M$ M$ M$!!!!!!
Dick Cheney?
It's a sad time when MS can lobby an international standards group on a closed, propriety format.
IBM, who have been shackled by MS with this vote and now the US government banning them from tendering, must be feeling the pinch.
The only way to fight back in my opinion is to keep using odf and proactively supporting the ODF standard.
Frankly, I don't mind if there are 2 document standards as well as PDF, as long as they are either fully interchangeable.
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
Twitter posts, then agrees with himself. How typical nowdays.
Make SELinux enforcing again!
Pathetic. The "standard" is flawed technically, its bloated, and it was superseded before it was written. Goes to show how the ISO groups can be bought with bribes. Lets just hope that this turns out to be a bad nightmare, and tomorrow OOXML as a standard becomes a thing of the past.
I will try hard to not support this broken, worthless standard. Rise up and boycott OOXML!
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
The ISO standard, besides showing how corrupting Microsoft's monopoly money is, changes nothing.
We have the same situation today as we did yesterday.
(1) A "standard" which is only a standard because a monopoly uses it.
(2) A "standard" which is independently implemented by (n>1) vendors.
So, as long as *we* the technologically literate stay "on message" like the P.R. spinmasters, we can use this in our favor.
The "April fools document standard" AFDS for short, should be as well known as the "halloween documents." And when they ask why it is called the "april fools document standard," tell them.
How does one "look like a seething idiot" ?
Isnt it our thoughts/ideas that make us idiots or not, and you can actually see ones thoughts yet, and what does seething look like anyway ?
Ah, maybe you didnt mean what you said and you were just posting like a seething idiot.
I guess if you had an eye for detail you wouldnt be a M$ fanboi.
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
Why wait until you upgrade?
Hmm, this situation rings a bell...
That which does not kill us makes us... st
In other news, ISO has approved the new standard value of Pi. It is now to be valued at 4. Various industries have said that this move will make them spend less to fulfill their orders, in particular when products are bought by area.
Nobody should care what ISO says anymore. News at 11.
M$ is going after its own customers, not the ODF user base. What incentive does an Office user have to upgrade from a perfectly good document format (that you can share with almost anyone) to a format that no one else can use? Well, now, because the new format is a standard, whereas the old doc standard is not. Microsoft's biggest competitor is Microsoft, and the ISO standard is just a way to keep milking the MSOffice teat.
What's the big deal anyway? Anyone seriously considering which document format to standardise on isn't going to form a decision just because of an ISO standard. If only MS products support the "standard" then it doesn't really count for much. IT departments that are aware of the ISO standard would (I hope) be considering the technology on its technical merits and how it works for them and their systems.
how is babby formed?
I literally would not care if somebody wrote O$$ instead of OSS. I see a HUGE difference between that and "open sores".
M$ is a very concise and obvious abbreviation and the dollar sign even looks a bit like an s and t printed atop each other and pronounces when read quickly the same. And anybody over 30 was exposed to "Jerry's kids" commercials when they were a child and "MS" means Multiple Sclerosis. I am NOT joking, that is a fact. Really would Microsoft rather be associated with money or a crippling childhood disease?
And I literally see ZERO responses if somebody says "microsucks" or the much more common "windoze". But every single time somebody says "M$" the response is there almost instantly. I think the problem is that they really are hurt by this, while they are not hurt by obviously childish things, that (like "open sores") actually make the poster look stupid. They are hurt because "M$" does NOT make the poster look stupid so they attempt to deny that perception and claim it *does* make the poster look stupid by immediately making this response.
I think also if you check my posting history you will see that I write "Microsoft" mostly. I used to write "MicroSoft" because I really thought that was the proper name, until somebody here complained that I was posting a grave insult to the beloved company...
Ok, someone explain to me why a standard for office documents based on XML is bad. Surely it is better than the proprietary Office formats (e.g. .DOC) that were the defacto standard before.
Oh, that's right -- it's from Microsoft. I guess that's reason enough, on slashdot.
Wanted: witty unique signature. Must be willing to relocate.
I went to a top 20 institution for my BA's (graduating quite recently)
half way through my time there they replaced their IT staff.
Shortly thereafter I had to start spoofing user agents because their official websites were making like it was 1998 again (this was 2004). Namely, I was being told safari was not compatible with the same html, css, and javascript which was there for years before, and apparently only internet explorer and firefox could render the same old pages. They had apparently been impregnated with magic beans.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Like virginity, credibility is only something one can perserve or loose.
Unlike Voltare, who regarded virginity as a corectable perversion, credibility is the coin of the technical trade. Lose it, and watch ALL your works fade away.
If the ISO doen't move to retract OOXML as a "standard", their other standards will only be seen as gross manipulation of the technical industry, and be discarded and ignored.
Pity. Aside from how much work has gone into other ISO standards, I can't quite see the the people who have loaned their reputation sticking by a body so obviously bribed, coorsed, and schivvied into "accepting" such a "standard" to continue to support it.
I'd think that within a very short time, those who regard their honor as something more than coin to be traded to the corporation most likely to bid high, twist arms to breaking, and cheat at every turn will start to distance themselves from the ISO because of this.
It would be one thing if the offered "standard" met some acceptable technical goal. In my estimation, what we're seeing isn't a technical goal, but a lock in to assure undeserved profit.
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
In the first ISO vote the members had 50 pages of complaints
around 1.5% of them have been adressed in the meantime
what non-bribed ISO member would say now "wow, they adressed so many complaints that I can go from a 'no' vote to a 'yes' vote"?
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
I don't understand how they messed it up so badly. It's an idea they first tried in MS Office for Mac, and it was actually pretty useful in the implementation there -- they added a context-sensitive floating window that contained collapsable sections for each of several functional areas. It essentially made toolbars context-sensitive, floating, and collapsable. But they didn't take away the menu bar when they did it -- you could still get at everything via the menus. And they didn't try to put context-insensitive things, like "Save" or "Options" into the new floating window.
But then Office 2007 came out and said "What if we took away toolbars AND menus. That would be twice as cool as what we did in the Mac version 4 years ago." I've long since given up on using Word for document creation -- the last version I used regularly was Word 5.0a -- but just supporting other people in Office 2007 makes my head hurt.
The ISO is relevant to some extent in the manufacturing, heavy machinery, etc industries, but when it comes to IT they're pretty much irrelevant. My little company will continue using and working on whatever format we use today, and so will your big company there. M$ word is pretty much the default for documents, as is excel for spreadsheets. Did you expect a major change if ODF won?
I wonder if part of MS's motivation was to distract the F/OSS community from real progress by getting them all excited by this meaningless issue. Do you remember the predictions that MS was going to control the Internet if Netscape didn't prevail? Has that happened yet?
ISO isn't the authority for what format is best
as we have seen, it isn't
The desktop software on 95% of computers won't read ODF and never will.
well now, that's the problem with ooxml becoming iso, isn't it? now it will stay this way.
while i agree with your critics in some level, it IS a black wednesday.
Do you have links backing up those claims and numbers, or did you pull the numbers out of you-know-where?
http://dilemma.gulecha.org - My philospohical short film.
I am an old PC gamer. Started with CGA... Remember defender of the crown ? Winter sport ? Well I do. And up to last week MS would have won my business just because of directx. Last week end I just went so sick of the crap shoveled to me that I bought a game console. I am NOW seriously thinking that PC gaming won't be worth the hassle except for a few big games which don't come to console. And for my oldies, I installed recently ubuntu with dosbox. After a lot of pain to start, works like a charm by the way. Thanks to all the /. which answered & helped me.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
I haven't seen a Wraplineslikeword95 but I have seen AutoSpaceLikeWord95 which was deprecated a while ago. http://www.ecma-international.org/news/TC45_current_work/New%20proposed%20dispositions%20extend%20progress%20in%20addressing%20all%20National%20Body%20comments.htm Unless your converter has to convert Word95 documents I don't see why you would need to implement that to have a compliant converter.
Sig is for Signature, so you don't have to manually sign every post.
...may have been rigged
"We live in a global world" - Harvey Pitt, former Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman
Here's how I envisiage fighting this
first set up a web site with a simplish name that's anonymously funded and transparently run, indeed I am an MCP at a Microsoft only shop, i'd be happy to run the site but my priorities lie with feeding my children.
It needs to be factual and neutral. Never yelling, or preaching. It needs to be the (webstandards.org) acid test of the document suite / format world.
It needs to show clearly where each of several major office suites stand in relation to compatibility to both formats, and yes, it needs to highlight OO.os flaws neutrally and just as prominently as any other suite's.
It needs to link directly and clearly to plugins for each suite for each format (where available). It needs to explain each suites compatibility issues and explain workarounds for maximum platform compatibility.
It needs to show, clearly licencing against said office suites and support costs.
It needs to show patent issues, again, factually and clearly.
All of the above should be targetted not at the IT crowd but at the Pointy Haired Bosses of the world.
Then the task will fall to us lot, the OSS advocates, to make OO.o and ODF the clear, statistical winner in the above site.
captcha: infinity
If you don't risk failure you don't risk success.
Actually, I already have the mechanism for this, on a much wider scale. Time to have a chat with some people (because I don't have the time to build it but I can guide it). Suggest you keep an eye on Switzerland - give me a month or so (have to set this up as a Uni project).
[engaging evil part of my security brain, tab "counter social engineering"]
Insert
Is it time for an Open ISO group to be set up to create real standards?
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
Read it and weep.
http://www.iso.org/iso/pressrelease.htm?refid=Ref1123
Pathetic, if you ask me.
I work in a pure Microsoft shop in a large enough company, developing against several ISO financial standards.
I still think this has been a terrible way to create a standard. My objections are not technical, as I have not gone to the effort of reading the specification in its entirety, my objections are procedural.
Try again.
MSOXML is underdocumented, which means that one can not reliably create documents in one application, and expect another application to be able to read them. This will cause the de-facto hegemony of MS-Office to continue.
MSOXML is also very ugly, meaning that a lot of things will be much harder than they should be.
Most of all, if one wants a document format for the future, than it should be a high quality specification, and not an obvious rush job like this one. You know what fast track is for: things like SQL, that was an extremely well established standard before it even got to ISO. Pdf would be a similar candidate.
But I'm sure you know all this, and just asked to question to create some goodwill for MS.
The Czech Republic, for one.
http://xmlguru.cz/2008/01/ecma-response-to-czech-ooxml-comments ECMA already provided proposed resolution for 75 comments (out of total 75 Czech comments). This means that 100.00% of Czech comments were handled by ECMA.
90.67% of comments were satisfactory resolved.
8.00% of comments were resolved only partially.
1.33% of comments were not satisfactory resolved.
...
In fact I was really surprised how many "green boxes" are there at the end. I was expecting that ECMA will properly address only part of our comments. The vast majority of Czech comments was addressed by ECMA so it is time to say yes to OOXML. The countries that switched from NO to YES did so on the merits of the improvements that were made, not based on "bribes". That you and the others are actually accusing (both implicitly and explicitly) the Czech Republic and others that switched from NO to YES of taking bribes and whatnot with zero evidence is outrageous.
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
Hey, if you can repost that same crap drivel, back atcha homes:
You obviously have never had to implement anything that needed to conform to a defined, published standard. If you had, you would never in a million years defend a ragged mess which can't even deal with Julian dates without referencing a broken proprietary binary (Excel 97). And you wouldn't defend OOXML, in raving terms including liberal usage of boldface, all caps and ad hominem attacks, if you understood the difference between a properly written standard and one cobbled together in panic that large institutional customers would abandon a proprietary format over concerns of long-term data accessibility, bit rot and lock-in.
Enjoy your new spec.
In other news, astrophysicists have announced that they now know what all that dark matter is: it's stupidity.
Dude, Linux is my primary* OS, and I think "M$" is childish and stupid. Not everyone who thinks calling them "M$" is stupid is a microsoft fanboy. I'm *certainly* not.
*As in out of every month I spend less than five hours in Windows. If that.
I totally agree.
But please stop calling my office - your cheque's in the mail.
Hugs,
Steve B
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
None of this however invalidates my point that it is in Microsoft's own interest to cooperate with people like me who care about the public interest (I'm representing the Swiss Internet User Group) on fixing shortcomings of the OOXML specification. I agree that significant conflicts of interest between the public interest and Microsoft's corporate interest exist, but it's not a zero-sum game, and I do believe that what I'm talking about is an area where cooperation is possible and makes economic sense.
For people who have never used anything else, yes it's much easier...
KDE/Gnome and OSX are also much easier for a new user to pick up than windows...
However, people already have prior experience of doing things differently, and thus are resistant to change regardless of wether that change is for the better or not.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
I think what we need now is an open source compatibility test suite to detect and flag when Microsoft departs from the OOXML standard, as they invariably will sooner or later.
We need to establish that the standard (such as it is) defines the format, not Microsoft's Diet Coke swilling VC++ hackers.
- The ISO members (the JTC1 committee) found 3522 defects in the OOXML standard
- The Ecma grouped these complaints and proposed 1027 changes on about 2300 pages
- Microsoft said they had adressed 662 of the proposals
- At the isos ballot resolution meeting (BRM) 900 of the 1027 proposals were not checked (they didn't check if MS had implemented the changes)
- Rob Weir used a random sampling technique to estimate how many proposals were actually implemented: about 1.5%
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9065903&intsrc=news_listhttp://www.pro-linux.de/news/2008/12520.html (german)
http://politics.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/04/0310208
http://www.robweir.com/blog/2008/03/how-many-defects-remain-in-ooxml.html
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
Link to ISO press release:
http://www.iso.org/iso/pressrelease.htm?refid=Ref1123
Man, how do you have time to do all this? You should write a lifestyle guru book exaplaining how you manage to spend hours writing posts on Slashdot and replying to yourself and still fit in things like eating and washing.
Of course, the Czech Republic comments covered only a tiny fraction of what was wrong with the standard, so the actual improvement was, relatively speaking, fairly negligible - even when you take all the comments submitted by all the countries, there's still far more things left unfixed than there are things that have been fixed. (There just wasn't enough time to find everything.) It looks like several of the partially-resolved issues are still likely to break interoperability, too. To be honest, saying that "OK, we can approve it now" based on this seems a bit iffy...
Will be interesting to see who voted for what and what made them change if they did. Potentially there could be a lot of fallout for those involved as the facts come to light.
Personally I have lost faith in ISO because it seems the worlds largest computer software manufacturer can just buy their own standards from this organisation.
"Because we are not employing at entry level, offshoring will kill our industry stone dead."
Well if you want to open an ISO 29500 document, then yes it's deprecated. However, MS word doesn't & won't use the version accepted by ISO - making changes like that utterly pointless.
In summary, it really doesn't matter what the spec says. You have to follow what MS does. It's a great spec - you can print it out, tear it up and use it as toilet paper, along with ISO's reputation.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I would encourage everyone to email their disgust directly to ISO. I have, using the webform for comments on the ISO site.
>>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".
Absolute 100% pure unadulterated crap. Msft is entirely capable, and welcome, to use ODF. In fact, I think plug-ins already exist.
I am sick to death of this brazen lie being propagated on slashdot, and elsewhere. It is not true, and it makes no sense. You statement is based on the assumption that ODF locks msft out - and that assumption is simply not true.
So what if everybody has to use a crappy standard, it's all about 'da bling.
Brussels, 2 April 2008 -- ISO members failed to disapprove the Open XML format. Microsoft has compromised the International Standards Organisation (ISO) during the rush to get a stamp for their Office OpenXML (OOXML), using unfair practices such as committee stuffing in several countries and political interventions of ministers in the standardization process.
A vote by national members of ISO indicates a majority for the controversial Open XML format. OOXML received 75 Prozent approval votes of p-members of JTC1, among them many nations of questionable expertise in standardization. In September a first attempt to approve the 6000 page standard Open XML failed with more than 3500 submitted comments. As in September many of the new approval votes were won by political high level intervention and the vendors dominance in national technical committees.
From June 2007 to March 2008, technical committees around the world studied and analysed one of the largest IT standards proposal ever, Microsoft's OOXML. In order to get its format safely through ISO, Microsoft had to stuff committees, lobby ministers, mobilize business partners, and rewrite the ISO rules.
The rush for Open XML started with the adoption of OpenDocument format as the ISO standard for office documents (ISO 26300:2006). The open standard ODF is considered a danger for the market monopolist Microsoft with its flag ship product Microsoft Office. Governments worldwide are switching to the ISO standard OpenDocument Format (ODF) as their default format for office documents. ODF is a vendor neutral ISO open standard. The reaction of Microsoft to defend their monopoly position was to rush through their incompatible alternative format Open XML via ECMA international to become a second ISO standard. Although the Open XML format lacks maturity on formal grounds Microsoft has been able to hijack the entire ISO process. The technical review of the format was strongly obstructed by its originator and its political interference in the ISO process.
Presence of Microsoft Business Partners has been reported in the following countries: Belgium, Brazil, Colombia, Denmark, Egypt, Italy, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Mexico, Nigeria, Portugal, Slovenia, Sweden, Switzerland and the United States of America. Furthermore, it has been reported in several countries, such as France and Malaysia, that Microsoft has lobbied the government and the responsible ministers to override the decisions of the technical committees, which spoke out against an approval of the format.
Jan Wildeboer, Solution Architect at RedHat, explains: "OOXML was created solely for use in Microsoft applications. It is not currently suitable as an international standard, because it cannot be completely implemented by anyone without access to inside information. Although it is more than 6,000 pages long, it contains various references to things that are defined only in Microsoft's software, not in the specification itself."
Rui Seabra, Vice-President of ANSOL and member of the technical committee in Portugal, says: "Congratulations are due to Microsoft. They've been able to push an incomplete and buggy document as an international standard, that only they can implement. It's now proven that ISO/IEC standard of quality can be subverted."
Laurent Richard, of the Belgian Association Electronique Libre, says: "The war about office file formats only begins. The real war will be the adoption of OOXML by governments, and their citizens, which will have to buy again a copy of Microsoft Office to find out what the decision makers are doing. We will ask the European Commission to scrutinize this format, and garantee that competitors can have 100% interoperability with the Microsoft Office, which is not possible with the current OOXML pseudo-standard."
Pieter Hintjens, of the European Software Market Association, says:"Nobody wants standards you can buy. Microsoft bought a standard at ECMA, now they bought ISO. Who wants this?"
Graham Taylor, Openforum Europe, regards the outco
They wanted two standards, I say give them two standards. Microsoft should immediately support ODF and ISO OOXML , right now office supports neither of them, office should be able to open both formats without any translator or complication, Microsoft must implement both formats correctly following the specs closely, and ODF must be the default, since it is the default for office formats while OOXML is, like they said many times, is the default for legacy documents.
Microsoft have stated multiple times how they want freedom of choice, so now they should try following all the things they said. They hope we would forget all of this soon, but that's ought not to be the case.
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
This may be one of the most expensive "standards" ever foisted off on the business world if you factor in the cost of all the influence buying Microsoft engaged in.
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
Did Microsoft happen to completely remove the Excel date bug specification from their so-called "standard"? If the answer is not "Yes", then the standard is still shoddy and should be discarded like the rubbish it is.
Microsoft can buy any vote it needs. Why was this discussed as if there would be any outcome other than a Microsoft win? You cannot stop a company with the money to buy off every major decider on Earth.
> "Yes, because Microsoft obviously purchased 86% of the world."
What kind of silly crap is that? Microsoft only had to buy off a few dozen people.
> "This obviously will surprise you, but most people in the world are happy with Microsoft products."
What does this have to do why msft products? And why do msft shills constantly try to confuse standards with products? Msft is no more forbidden to use ODF than msft is forbidden to use ASCII or HTML. What is wrong with ms-word supporting ODF?
PHBs will see MSOOXML (hearafter pronounce Moose-OX-Emmel) as an open standard, when we know it's not. Until there's a fraud investigation and prosecution (for any aspect of it -- no mater how small) this will stand. Once MS is convicted for some petty fraud in relation to it, there will be a concrete rebuttal. "It's an open standard." "The standard was pushed through by fraud."
Until that day, we're left with paragraphs of response, which won't be believed -- we need a one sentence response backed up by a WSJ article.
Do I implement a brand new spec that is clean because it ignores and wishes away all the legacy of the past, or do I implement a more complex spec that transitions them?
Developers like the earlier
Users like the later.
OSS is typically dev oriented.
Commercial software is user oriented (because they have to be).
All the press releases have it wrong -- ECMA/ISO didn't approve MSOOXML as a standard. Approval means it was evaluated. The standard doesn't even exist yet. There are 6000 pages that have gone unread for the most part and lots of broken pieces. No, Microsoft bought off ECMA, ISO and the others to buy the standard.
Of course, in the process they totally destroyed any and all credibility of the ISO and the standards process. Thankfully, ODF is still a real standard that can be employed.
Banjo - The more I know about Windoze, the more I love *nix
We are talking about the independent consumer market here.
Intel developed the Itanium because they needed a desktop/workstation 64-bit x86 architecture since Apple-IBM-Motorola had a functional one with the PowerPC 970 (G5) and AMD was rapidly developing a competing one... one that would eventually become the standard.
Without AMD, Intel would have been able to simply sit back and sell 32-bit Pentiums for years before the PowerPC took away any significant chunk of the market. AMD's faster, better, cheaper x86 has pushed Intel's development ahead faster than any other factor has. Even if you ignore the technical advancements that the competition brought forth, AMD has kept Intel's prices down, and by simple transposition, kept Intel's profits down as well.
Consider this: if AMD had gone bust a few years back, Intel would've stuck with the floundering Pentium 4 architecture and not have been forced to adapt the Pentium III into the Pentium M and eventually into their current consumer line, the Core 2.
Development time costs money. Competition costs money. Sure it is needed for products to evolve but try explaining that to the stockholders.
From looking at "twitters" postings I believe he is a fake poster trying to make OSS supporters look stupid. His arguments are illogical and he makes obviously false claims about Linux. I suspect that is why he prominantly puts "M$ junk" into his signature, in an attempt to associate the M$ combination with more silly stuff like the word "junk".
Would like to see a response that says "Saying Windoze is really childish" where the original post is something similar to these M$ ones where it is some argument and NO other insulting words are used other than "Windoze". I see literally dozens of instant "Saying M$ is childish" responses no matter what the wording is. I believe this is due to denial on the posters part that the M$ abbreviation is in common use. Besides, if it really was childish, why point it out?
And "Emm Ess" is certainly confused, as that is EXACTLY what the disease Multiple Sclerosis was called. When seen in the context of a state, people do not read "emm ess", they read "Missisippi", but when reading a post about Microsoft with the letters MS they read "emm ess". You are obviously too young to have been bombarded ENDLESSLY with these adds, believe me the identification is quite deeply programmed into me and I suspect many other people.
Get out more often. Seriously.
Were they fixed? Really? Like the other 98% of the comments, that were "fixed" even nobody reading the "fix" due to lack of time?
Did you know that they had to vote NO if any one of their issues weren't fixed? "Nearly every one" doesn't cut it. Also, they could vote NO even if all of their issues were solved just because they discovered a new one, or because they think some other problem that wasn't fixed is important.
Now, how did the Czech Republic know that their issues were fixed if nobody readed the final document before voting?
Rethinking email
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
I witnessed first hand the buying of an ISO 9001 certification.
I used to work for a company that manufactured industrial equipment for power plants, oil refineries, chemical plants, ships, etc. The company had a "quality system" in place and had ISO 9001 certification. We used to get audited periodically and every couple years had to get re-certified (it was a big pain in the ass).
Fast forward a few years and the company was purchased by a HUGE German corporation. When the time came for the yearly ISO audit, we were told to scrap our quality manuals and mark our departmental manuals as "reference only". I think something similar happened to the manuals at the next level up. We were then placed under the corporate umbrella and received a new ISO 9001 certification as part of this larger group.
Since then, I have switched companies within the same industry, and I work in the sales department. I can count the number of times on one hand that we are asked to provide proof of our ISO 9001 certification each year, and it is usually the same companies that ask each year.
I do not believe that ISO 9000 = quality products/services.
I wish I had a big bag of money. I'd get all kinds of stuff to go my way, too.
I might know what I'm talkin' about, but then again, this is Slashdot...
Can someone please help me understand what the deal with OOXML is? If the standard sucks, and no one uses it, does it matter? Is the standard supposed to help Microsoft with its antitrust problems somehow? Is it supposed to somehow help Microsoft advance its business "unfairly"? is the problem that ISO isn't seen as legitimate organization anymore, because it passed a badly flawed standard?
-------------------
You refer to Excel's "feature" for being compatible with the leap-year bug introduced by Lotus 1-2-3 in the mid-1980's, right?
This is tricky because there are in existence spreadsheet files that actually rely on the leap-year bug in order to work. These spreadsheet files may rely on the bug implicitly or explicitly (e.g. the spreadsheet author added code to the spreadsheet to workaround the bug), so fixing the bug would break these spreadsheets. (Anyone notice the irony that IBM, the owner of Lotus today, doesn't give a damn about helping users of Lotus 1-2-3 transition their files to ODF format and so is willing, and indeed proud, to provide no path to transition Lotus 1-2-3 files that rely on Lotus' leap-year bug to ODF? But I digress.)
This issue has been addressed in ISO OOXML. Brian Jones made numerous blog entries since the September vote on how this issue was resolved:
2007-12-11: Allowing for ISO-8601 Dates
2007-12-21: Dates and the Leap Year Bug
2008-03-15: Discussion of dates and leap-year bug at the BRM
2008-03-25:
http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2008/03/25/can-i-mention-that-it-s-also-in-odf.aspx Spreadsheet Dates
Folks have been discussing this one for about a year now; it's about the date format used in SpreadsheetML. In the Ecma responses and even in the BRM, we made a number of changes to make everyone happy. Here is where we are now with dates in SpreadsheetML:
* There is a new date datetype for cell values, and the only way to store into that datatype is with ISO 8601.
* For calculations primarily, there is often the need to convert from a date into a serial value or back. For this purpose you need to know the date base, or epoch, and in the ISO version of ODF there are essentially 3 date bases (only one of which is transitional)
* The leap year bug, and issues around dates before 1900 are now only allowed in transitional conformant files, but if the file is strict it cannot use these. [Snipped text that goes on to talk about how ODF allows multiple ways of storing dates, and implementors must similar conversion techniques as OOXML once the ODF 1.1 (the version that allows spreadsheet formulas) is released.] The upshot is that OOXML spreadsheets can only store dates in ISO 8601 format (unlike ODF, which stores dates in multiple formats), and while old "transitional conformant files" may rely on the leap-year bug, such files are not in "strict" compliance with OOXML.
So the leap-year bug is completely removed for new files, but can be used for transitional files. Which is essentially what you guys wanted, that old files may have to deal with legacy crap, but new files should be "clean". I'm sure this isn't enough to satisfy you, but it was enough for those that matter, and even Rob Weir hasn't made much effort to bash this resolution despite the leap-year bug being his main talking point for well over a year now.
This only further demonstrates how most of you are unaware of the improvements that have been made. The (ostensible) technical reasons for rejecting OOXML were addressed. All you have left are the political reasons, and such reasons should not impact ISO.
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
"Getting work done" apparently is your eupheism for "being forced to buy an expensive software package from Micro-planned-obsolescence-soft".
Do you get hard when you make these sad attempts at defending Microsoft's incompatible file formats?
What should we use? "Microsoft" is a trademark, and "MSFT" - their stock ticker - is too un-geeky. Everyone on the site understands "M$". What other criteria do you need?
IS is just following tradition of other standards entities like IEC and ECMA.
Take a look at the IEC 61158 Fieldbus standard, AKA the "ugly 8-headed beast". It is, by technical standards, an inefficient, inconsistent, complicated mess and even those who supported its ratification concede this. Basically, it takes once-proprietary protocols for SCADA/Process control/automation in verbatim and declared them standards. There is duplication, overlap, etc. all over the place.
You basically don't try to be "fully IEC 61158 compliant"...vendors generally strive to comply with one of the eight "types". Vendors generally stick to the type they invented for the whole product line, then provide converter/bridge devices to one or more others. For example, in North America "Type 2" (ControlNet) is prevalent and is the protocol of choice for Rockwell's Allan-Bradley products since Rockwell was a leading force in its creation. Likewise in Europe (Germany especially) "Type 3" (PROFIBUS) is prevalent and used extensively in Siemens products because Siemens was a steering force in the consortium that created the protocol. Both Rockwell and Siemens create converters to other types like "Type 1" (FOUNDATION Fieldbus).
The whole logic behind this messy standard was not to make an easy-to-follow, fully-implementable standard. The prime motivation was to eliminate trade barriers and promote interoperability (ie. now that the protocols are part of a standard one vendor cannot demand royalties from third parties that inter-operate, nor can interoperability be broken by the original vendor without losing standards compliance).
This serves the purpose well enough, but with OOXML there is a difference: One single vendor invented the format, without any consultation with any other interested parties, and it effectively retains ownership of the format. It is possibly encumbered with patents, and its pledge not to litigate has potential conditions, especially regarding "commercial" implementations. At least with IEC 61158 all the different "types" are from many different vendors, and in most cases the creators either never "owned" the standard (for example, Siemens participated in a consortium at the behest of the German gov't) or the standard was given over to a non vendor-specific entity long before IEC 61158 was ratified (as Rockwell has done with ControlNet). And, since the standard is periodically reviewed some "types" may fall into disuse and be deprecated and new "types" added or old ones expanded to consider new technologies. I fear that OOXML as a standard is vulnerable to disrepair, and lack of wide adoption beyond MSFT because that one vendor so completely controls the standard.
ISO is dead.
Any geeks here going to trust them again?
I've been involved in development and implementation of international standards (admittedly not ISO, but JCP), and I agree wholeheartedly with the parent poster.
We had a medium-sized Java package to standardize, a couple of dozen classes. It took us about a year and a half, plus an extra half a year of maintenance, clarifying those annoying little omissions that people only spot after release. The total size of the spec was under 200 pages. It was all achieved by consensus, with several competing vendors represented, and other interested parties - including users, developers, and companies who would deploy the implementations.
Although there were some lively debates, at no point was the mood partisan, there were no "irregularities" and since consensus was the norm, issues very rarely came to even an informal vote. According to the rules, the spec could not be ratified until both a test suite and a reference implementation were delivered. In our case, these were developed completely separately from one another.
It was all actually a very pleasant and rewarding process.
If we had seen anything like the irregular behavior we have seen on the OOXML NBs, we would have voted off the spec lead quicker than a very quick thing. (Nothing like this happened, of course - our spec lead was and is well respected.)
I wanted to post this to point out that spec development can be, and usually is, open, honest and friendly, even between competitors.
I also wanted to point out that the technical side takes a long time. It took us two years to get to the point where we were completely happy with our little 200-page spec.
I fail to see how the 6000+ pages of DIS 29500 can even be reviewed properly, let alone be swept through a standardization process this fast. Even a good spec has holes that must be patched up, and are only spotted when someone looks at them from a different angle than you. Rob Weir's excellent blog entry on defect sampling his has been linked elsewhere, and suggests that, statistically, only a small minority of the defects in the spec have actually been found.
This, coupled with a lack of test suite or reference implementation, make it difficult for me to see how the ISO national bodies could possibly have voted anything other than "no", on purely technical grounds.
Unfortunately, this is the argument from personal incredulity, and clearly false, because they did. I would therefore like to know why.
Sean Ellis
Follow OfQuack's antics on Twitter.
Yeah, I kinda knew I was setting that up, but thought we could play the 'straight guy, funny guy' routine. Slam dunk.
If I have to damn well pick which one to support in my app how the hell does that help me? Now I have to support two standards. I wish the ISO would just roll a dice and pick one already.
And I'd respond with "uh... what the heck are you talking about? I'm not downloading a 97MB office suite just to send you a document" and stop dealing with you. You'll probably claim "and good riddance" but let's be honest, you'd run out of customers pretty fast.
Then again, what the hell are idiots sending templates to people for?
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
MS wouldn't be playing with singularity - they'd be playing with a black hole that would zap the only remaining cash cow. That's why they basically pulled all the stops for ISO - they know time is up.
The more I look at the risks they're taking, the more it smacks of panic. And I find that *very* interesting indeed, I wonder how long Wall Street will take to spot that. Forever, I think, MS knows very well just how easy it is to get a favourable analysts opinion, and none of them want to mention the water in the engine room because they make good money out of it.
But I bet you quite a few have already casually ambled over to the life boats. I think it's called 'diversifying a portfolio'. God help their shares when Wall Street wakes up: brand appreciation through the floor, no viable products, antitrust is really starting to bite (they can ignore it only for so long) and with this ISO farce they have opened themselves up for massive trouble. There's only so much you can sweep under the carpet before someone noticed the bulge.
IMHO it can't come soon enough. We need progress in IT, OLPC has shown that there's plenty of innovation waiting in the wings once MS stops it from happening.
Insert
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Well, I was actually going for a joke, but seeing that you're not a hypocrite ruined it quite nicely. Hmmph.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
Hmmm, what about That's the good thing about standards, there is so many to choose from" ;-)
My ism, it's full of beliefs.