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EU's Anti-Trust Investigation of OOXML Continues
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Since January, the EU has been investigating whether Microsoft broke anti-trust laws while advocating OOXML. That investigation continues following its passage as a standard. Meanwhile, the ISO approval of OOXML is being appealed, so Microsoft hasn't won just yet."
Am I the only one who is experiencing cramped comments? About 1/5 of the page is just a margin.
Summation 2
After having RTFA (sorry), I don't see where anybody is appealing the decision, yet.
IBM issued a broad support statement so as to leave all doors open.
FSFE said this must not happen again...
Nobody issued a statement indicating an appeal had been filed.
There was this one started by some Finnish guy named torvalds that seems to have taken off pretty well. Some of our governments use it now.
Standards are a major pillar of a modern technological society. Attempting (whether successfully or not) to sabotage the standardization process of a well-respected source of standards, amounts to attempting to destabilize society. This is clearly utterly unethical. The potential damage is inconceivable.
MS did this evil thing either because they do not care at all about anything except their short-term profits, or because they are scared out of their wits. In either case they need to be contained fast, before the world is without a credible (read: of high integrity and producing high quality syandards) standardization organisation.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Wasn't Linus Torvalds from Finland? Doesn't that mean Europe can at least claim some responsibility for the Linux kernel?
Well I don't read that an appeal has been filed yet.
But it will be.
To not appeal as this point is tantamount to agreeing to the decision to make it a standard. It is demonstrable that a great many people, companies and organizations do not agree (in fairly strong terms) as we can assume an appeal is inevitable.
At this point, an appeal makes a stand and casts doubt on OOXML as a standard - so win or lose in the appeal, the mere fact that there is one will help our case.
Lastly, I state again - if OOXML passed the agreed consultations and tests for a standard, was approved in the conventional standard, and brought a demonstrably superior implementation to ODF then I would accept it in a heartbeat.
The OOXML Standard was bought and the ISO stood idly by, hand extended.
Therefore the ISO is now irrelevant; so who cares about the ISO.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
It is developed internationally and he lives in California now. And it is not owned and licenced by a corporation.
Sure. Just like Al Gore can claim responsibility for the internet.
It's even fuglier in Classic Mode. It's fugly in classic-threaded-mode, and utterly baffling in classic-flat-mode.
Whatever the Gods did, could they please undo it? The only bars I want to see are the single bars to the left of the blockquoted comments.
On a high-contrast color scheme (or even just turning document-specified colors off), it's even worse - the 3/4-box is thick and black around some comments, and absent on others, resulting in something extremely distracting.
It seems that all the complaints about the differences in style on idle.slashdot.org are going to have to be rehashed again.
It seems to me that it doesn't matter in the least if OOXML becomes a standard -- because frankly, nobody but Microsoft is going to put any significant effort into supporting it. A "standard" which is only supported by one product is about as useful as a two inch long drinking straw in a world of six inch tall soda cans... what's the point in even worrying about it?
Another example of this same problem is the Acid3 browser test. While I applaud the guys who came up with the tests for pointing out how many "standards" have been ignored by modern browsers, and I am quite impressed with the folks developing Opera and Safari/Webkit for their efforts to meet those standards... it still won't genuinely mean much until the forty foot gorilla in the room (Microsoft's Internet Explorer, of course) decides to play nice too.
In the case of Acid3, this is a regrettable fact of life that actually works to Microsoft's advantage -- which is why they aren't chomping at the bit to actually fix their browser. In the case of OOXML... Microsoft probably doesn't realize it yet, but they're pretty much screwed no matter how this thing ends.
Two wrongs do not make a right, and if IBM and other companies were wrong as he suggest, then so was Microsoft if they did the same, and it just goes to support the argument that the process was tampered with and the results discarded. By making that statement, he actually argued against his own position that everything went fine.
Note: I work for IBM, but this opinion is my own
MS lockin. 'Nuff said.
Here be signatures
You could try to appeal at the ISO/IEC JTC1 level based on the differences between what the ISO/IEC JTC1 directives say and how things were actually done. I have written up an analysis in which I come to the conclusion that an appeal which is based only on this kind of discrepancies will not be successful.
What I suppose could be done with some chance of success is to file an antitrust lawsuit as well as an appeal and demand in the appeal that ISO/IEC shall defer to the result of the antitrust lawsuit. (Trying to get the standardization organization officials to decide the antitrust concerns themselves would not be a good idea IMO, since standardization organizations are really not equipped for resolving legal conflicts).
And as at least several on Groklaw will be able to point out, that his is a distraction. The apparent corruption, unethical acts, and abandonment of ISO procedure have no direct origin in the desktop beyond the mindshare that brings and the eagerness for various ministers to turn quisling or turn a blind eye.
Money can't buy me love but apparently it can buy a standard! Microsoft is inherently evil. Like kicking puppies. Or raping a standards body!
International Sell-Out
In other words - just as much as the USA can claim responsibility for Windows...
I'm betting that day MS will tell anyone who did this will have to buy a whole 'nother, full version of Vista.
Some would label that as an act of terrorism.
No, no, you've got it all wrong. Terrorism is if someone ELSE does it. This is called US democracy, it's different. You get more people to suffer at once, and because it makes money for some it's OK.
Insert
Unfortunately, the dry-and-boring, but deeply authoritative ISO we all grew up knowing is nowhere to be seen here. I think they have about a year to repudiate this standard, and hand out appropriate punishment to the instigators. Otherwise, ISO standards will be understood as coming in two flavors: "Classic" ISO (before 2008-04-01) and "New" ISO (after 2008-04-01), the latter being understood to be crap.
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
Where is there even a hint of evidence that IBM did any such thing? They're still a powerful player in the solutions marketplace, but if they were abusing the system, wouldn't there be individuals and corporations OTHER THAN MICROSOFT making similar allegations? Wouldn't there have been a substantial surge of companies that had previously ignored ISO proceedings who suddenly were interested enough to sign-up and then vote on only that one standard, as Microsoft partners did?
These allegations seem to be just as baseless as the ones Ballmer made about Linux infringing on Microsoft's code. In other words, it's more of Microsoft doing what it does best-- using FUD to bolster its position and attack its opponents.
If IBM or other companies did such a thing, they would be WRONG. Until Microsoft and 3rd parties actually put-up some compelling evidence that supports that allegation, I think the more reasonable assumption is just that they're engaging in more deceit in their attempts to subvert the process. They've already demonstrated that they're capable of far worse, and the better way to defend their standard push would've been to cough-up the evidence about IBM rather than countering the alleged subtle subversion with bold-faced corruption.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
As it stands, the new OOXML 'standard' amounts to a mandate to upgrade to Office 2007 (yes, there's some kind of add-on for older versions, but most will just eat the upgrade). A nice win for MS.
It would be nice if Government mandates required that multiple, compatible implementations exist for whatever standards they mandate.
That might call Microsoft's bluff. Either they'd have to implement a working OOXML to ODF translator or help others implement OOXML and verify completeness.
Hell, by defining 'standard' in terms of actual multiple implementations, Office 2000 binary would make a better standard than OOXML. OOo does a pretty good job of reading them - better than anybody but MS is likely to do for OOXML anytime soon.
So, let's lobby for governments to just standdardize on ODF, PDF and Office 2000.
Of course, Abiword, KOffice and OOo would have to get cracking on making their ODF implementations compatible for ODF to make the cut.
Any guesses which job would be easier?
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
In Soviet Microsoft, executives vote to decide *your* behavior.
Sam ty sig.
You are welcome to it.
Yes, with their wallets. Because they don't have to buy MS products and there's no way anyone would ever have to buy Office if he didn't like it. Didn't the libertarian brigade tell you anything about the magic of capitalism?
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
> Two wrongs do not make a right, and if IBM and other companies were wrong as he suggest, then so was Microsoft if they did the same, and it just goes to support the argument that the process was tampered with and the results discarded. By making that statement, he actually argued against his own position that everything went fine.
True, but you should mention the scale, too. Even if this is true (and I don't know that it is), we're talking about two people. TWO people. Versus dozens of small countries joining the ISO just for this vote, offering bribes in Sweden, and having hundreds of partners join all over the world. So we have TWO PEOPLE versus a DOZEN COUNTRIES?
Because this is their statement, I have to assume that they're making it as strongly as they can. So what we have is AT MOST two people, because if there were more, they would have named them. And they represent IBM & Google outright, not mystery "partners" who have "independent" interests.
So it's funny. They complain about people joining who represent the companies they say they do to thwart a complaint that they essentially bribed "independent" partners to join (check the firehose link for a source, BTW, the editors appear to have cut out the Groklaw sources that detail most of the tampering).
Forgive me, but this is nothing more than an admission of guilt on Microsoft's part.
Yes, you missed something: the DoJ acting the way it did vs MS. I call that encouragement rather than punishment..
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Shouldn't the entire process be stopped? Shouldn't there be an end to end investigation?
I realize that the vote from Swedens was thrown out. But does it make any since to assume that if msft was only caught once, then such bribery only happened once? How does that make any sense at all? If msft is trying to bribe their way to a win, the why would msft only bribe one country?
Of course msft down played the incident. Msft said it was just one rouge employee. As absurdly implausible as that story sounds. I would be will to give msft the benefit of even the smallest doubt. But, come on, msft was caught cheating - let's at least stop the process long enough to find out for sure if it was in fact an isolated incident.
I dont really care what happens with the legal side of this, it doesnt matter how many times microsoft get caught with its trousers down, the uninformed masses just dont care (or worse say that its what you do when you have a monopoly? )
What i do want to see, is microsoft having thier asses handed to them on the technological side. With gnome office onboard there is a real chance that microsoft isnt going to have the best implimentation of thier own standard, its much harder to take a finished product and tweak it to conform to the new OOXML changes (without breaking anything), than it is to start from scratch and design a fully OOXML complient (when theres nothing to break). If the gnome team get OOXML implimented well, a small unix style aplication could easily allow convertion between OOXML and ODF ( go crazy and call it OOXML2ODF., Simply install it into the OS, and allow ODF complient programs to use OOXML programs without even relising and visa-versa, this would kill the document office suite link which is microsofts main weapon.
The problem is everybody is too busy bitching about OOXML to realise that MS have given us a chace to beat them on thier home turf.
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
http://www.canalys.com/pr/2008/r2008021.htm
The world has changed and we all have become metal men.