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."

Comments

Appeal?

[BACPro]

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.

Re:Appeal?

[Ngarrang]

Give it some time. The Groklaw article did state that there is a 2-month period for appeals to be filed.

Re:The new EU economic plan

[calebt3]

It is developed internationally and he lives in California now. And it is not owned and licenced by a corporation.

OT: Yeah, WTF's up with Slashdot today?

[Anonymous Coward]

Am I the only one who is experiencing cramped comments? About 1/5 of the page is just a margin.

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.

Difficulty of Appealing

[Adaptux]

After having RTFA (sorry), I don't see where anybody is appealing the decision, yet. The main problem with appealing is that at the ISO/IEC JTC1 level you cannot really file an appeal about the decision-making processes in the national standardization bodies. The reason for this is that the national standardization organizations are not branches of ISO. The power structure is the other way round: ISO is an international cartel of national standardization bodies.

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).

Re:Does it even matter if it's a standard?

[R2.0]

It matters because it is a long held practice of governments to specify a "standard" product so that they cannot be accused of choosing proprietary products. If OOXML had not become a standard, governments may not have been ALLOWED to use it according to their own internal rules. Of course, this process is often abused - specifications are often written so that only one product or company qualifies, even though they are not named. So now all governments need to is say "File formats shall comply with standard XYZ and - lo and behold - only MS office qualifies.

Re:Interesting quote from groklaw link

[tokul]

Fins also fired board chairman that opposed to MS-OOXML.