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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 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.
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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.
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(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.
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
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...
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
Using "M$" instead of Microsoft makes you look like a seething idiot.
Even the KDE foundation voted for it !!!
When his defense asked, "Which computer has Jon Johansen trespassed upon?" the answer was: "His own."
omgponieslikeinoffice97 ?
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.
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!
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 is babby formed?
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
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.
Read it and weep.
http://www.iso.org/iso/pressrelease.htm?refid=Ref1123
Pathetic, if you ask me.
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.
- 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
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."
>>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.
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?
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