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ISO Calls For OOXML Ceasefire
In response to the continued attacks on Microsoft's OOXML standard, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has called for a ceasefire. "Last week the ISO committee in charge of document standards, SC 34, met in Oslo to discuss the way forward for OOXML and ODF. The plenary session was marked by protests outside, largely carried out by delegates from a nearby open-source conference. The protesters were calling for OOXML to be withdrawn from ISO standardization -- something that could theoretically happen if a national standards body were to protest against its own vote within the next month or two."
We the undersigned wish to make it clear that the ISO fucked up and should never have made OOXML a standard, and that we will continue to attack ISO until it is revoked. Furthermore, we believe that this is for the ISO's own good, because allowing this result of obvious corruption to remain can only harm ISO's credibility as a standards organization. We also wish to remind the ISO that these so-called "personal attacks" have only become necessary in the first place because our technical objections have been entirely ignored. Finally, we note that the resolution to create working groups to maintain OOXML and "harmonize" it with ODF was stupid, because neither group would be necessary in the first place if the redundant, conflicting, and poorly-designed OOXML hadn't been approved in the first place!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
They deserve to be taken to the woodshed for a good spanking.
The ONLY ones who will benefit from a "cease-fire" are the ones who have the criticism coming to them. Let them admit they screwed up, that the processes behind their handling of MSOOXML are fatally flawed, and that a redo is necessary to preserve^Wrestore the integrity of ISO.
Kevin Smith on Prince
Reduce, reuse, cycle
the ISO is corrupted. MSFT fscked up the ISO and it is permanently damaged. Germany, Norway, Poland, and several other countries are looking into voting irregularities in the OOXML vote. For that fact alone the OOXML should have failed to pass pending the outcome of those investigations.
right now there are several MSFT P member countries that will no longer vote on anything because they are no longer being paid by MSFT to work with the ISO. These countries are deadlocking other standards and forcing them to fail because they refuse to vote on anything not OOXML. Those countries should have their votes discarded until they start attended and voting on things other than OOXML.
So why should the attacks stop? Has the corruption stopped yet?
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
From the Article:
"Another ad hoc group will also become operational in three months' time, collecting reports of "possible editorial or technical defects" in OOXML from national standards bodies, "liaison organisations" and the general public."
Shouldn't they have done that BEFORE making it a "standard"?
Yes, it is, however it won't work. The fact that it got the title "standard" will be used by Microsoft as a battering ram, and there won't always be someone with any sense around. Just look at voting machines. People in governments keep buying them, even from manufacturers who had been completely discredited. There now has to be a black mark on this thing so huge that Microsoft won't risk bringing it up.
The problem here is that if the MS-OOXML standard is kept, it confirms that the ISO is no longer relevant.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
No, what you just wrote does not make you seem witty, funny or smart. People are seriously concerned about OOXML, and someone here just takes potty shots? If you don't know what the issues are about, go find out before shooting off your keyboard.
The bribees did what they were paid for: vote for MS'OOXML.
So... NO!
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
That is the major effect though. I think that most unbiased observers would conclude that Microsoft's main goal in having OOXML rushed through is to allow .govs to tick the box that allows them to keep purchasing Microsoft Office. I have no faith that Microsoft will adhere to OOXML in letter or spirit, and in fact that having it 'controlled' by ISO makes this even less likely. Microsoft will not approach ISO to have new features included, they'll just binary-blob them in.
I say this as someone whose job it is to implement editors for previous (binary) versions of Office formats. The (new) guys working on our OOXML version are super stoked because (they say) it's much clearer. Sure, I tell them, but wait until Office >=2009 starts saving out documents with big embedded proprietary binary blobs. They'll still be OOXML 'compliant', for all the good that'll do us.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Sadly, I think you underestimate the apathy of the public over this stuff.
Joe user will hear the words "ISO Standard", "voting" and decide they neither know nor care WTF this is all about. The mainstream news will know this, and won't both reporting it.
Us in tech will find yet another reason to loathe Microsoft and their business practices, but to the average user, they simply will not care about this. You can't easily make this an issue people will understand why they should care about. It's so far off their radar as to be non-existent.
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
WTF is ISO playing at when they take something that CANNOT be said to be a "reasonable standard" and still APPROVE it as an ISO Standard?
Fuck that! ISO is supposed to approve STANDARDS. Not approve crap and then try to turn it into a "reasonable standard".
ISO sold out and is now trying to play the victim in this.
The ISO process to fast track and/or approve OOXML has been fought hard by technical people on the basis of technical deficiencies.
OOXML is *NOT* worthy of ISO approval. Any rational review of the "standard," will show that it is incomplete, non-specific, and completely worthless as a blue print on how to implement a document reader for a document.
How this got approved is clearly worth a corruption investigation. It calls into question the integrity of the people and organization that approved it.
It is nothing less than an attempt to eliminate the ability to share documents without paying Microsoft and maintain Microsoft's monopoly. The very thing the ISO standard is supposed to fight. It is criminal that these bastards have subverted the standards process as they did.
Calling for the end of "Personal attacks" is nothing more than saying "fuck you." Public statements questioning the motives and integrity of these people is the only ration course of action given what they have done. They deserve every last bit of it. Jailtime if we can find a law to fit the crime.
ISO got gamed, ganked and pwned. At this point, Microsoft are teabagging their corpse.
What ISO need to do right now is to grow a pair and admit that they're gagging on sweaty Ballmer-balls, rather than putting their fingers in their ears and going "La la la, the process is perfect, la la la, there's nothing wrong."
I doubt you'd find any unbiased informed observer that believes them, although I'm sure you'd find a few who would happily say that in return for a free upgrade of their corporate Office installs. The emperor has no clothes, no matter how many procedural boxes they tick off to try to hide their ding-a-ling dangling in the wind.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
It is a "personal attack" to question someone's integrity, in this case, however, they deserve what they get.
If they don't want to be called a microsoft lackey or corrupt, then they should have thought about that before hand.
Sorry, they can't whine just because people are exposing their corruption. Sucks to be them, but they brought it on themselves.
In the contrary. It's no longer about just OOXML.
In addition to targeting OOXML, we ought to start targeting the ISO as a whole.
This organization, theoretically being in charge for the Standardization of a thousand matters, has knowingly let its own standards drop to an abysmal low level.
It is time now to question the qualification of the ISO as such severely and, possibly, get rid of it, replacing it by an impartial and responsible institution.
One format passed without specifying a feature that may be useful, while the other passed with ambiguous, unimplementable or outright secret specifications. There is nothing strange about having a standardized format that doesn't specify everything you might want it to, what is strange is having a format which specifies things in an ambiguous, broken, and unimplementable manner.
To use a bad car analogy, if I made a spec for a car without specifying the color, that wouldn't be the end of the world. If, on the other hand, my spec said "The car should have this particular color, but I won't tell you what it looks like nor how to make it, but it has to be identical to this paint sample I have in my basement, and which present law prohibits you from reverse engineering" then the spec has a rather serious problem. OOXMl effectively does the latter.
In OpenDocument's defence, the OpenDocument committee stated that "A comment was submitted concerning the (inclusion) of a grammar for spreadsheet formulas which conforming implementations should support. While we think that having interoperability on that level would be of great benefit to users, we do not believe [sic] that this is in the scope of the current specification".
I disagree with the above excuse, but OpenFormula is being worked on, and will fix the problem. Approving a totally different and incompatible standard just makes the problem worse.
So, what personal attacks are there? Can someone point to an example? Certainly, many think that the ISO is broken, Microsoft is corrupt, and suspect that there was some serious fraud happening at some level but none of these are personal attacks. They're legitimate complaints about major organisations. So who is this person being attacked?
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Microsoft "INK" is funny as it is a decedent from "Pen Windows" which was inferior to "Go Computing" at the time. Microsoft's monopoly allowed them to threaten OEMS and have them abandon support for Go's platform.
Past crimes have a way of repeating themselves over and over again.
"INK" is all nice and everything, but it is hardly something that will, how did you put it, "cripple the medical industry at the very least."
I laugh at this. There is no reason why Microsoft can't support ODF and propose additions to the standard to support emerging technologies. Let these emerging technologies be developed and perfected in public.
If, however, they want their own proprietary system, no one is stopping them, but using the ISO standardization to promote their PROPRIETARY software is bogus.
Sounds like when a country invades and takes over, ousts the government and replaces it with their own, and then wants a cease-fire with the citizens?
They don't want to end hostilities. They've already committed all the atrocities and they are trying to escape retribution.
That's like someone shooting you and then trying to declare an armistice as you reach for YOUR revolver.
Ya right.
We'll take the cease-fire after the standard is struck down, thank you.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
There's nothing insane about the US Government selecting that standard, or doing many of the other questionable things it does. You just have to follow the money, and it all makes sense.
Your mistake is in assuming the US Government is acting (or tries to act) in the best interest of the US population as a whole.
I know it was a joke, but encoding != document format :)
Anyway, if you ever had to deal with ISO standards before, you'd realise that what Microsoft did is the least of your worries. ISO, W3C, OASIS, ECMA... they all suck. They're all organisations that make "standards" by comittee, and while that sounds great in theory, in practice its more like:
Member A: "I want our next standard to have feature X"
Member B: "No way, that would only further YOUR agenda and will destroy interop and/or makes its harder to implement for nothing! Instead, we should have feature Y, much better"
Member A: "Nooo! That would only further YOUR agenda. Its even worse than X!"
Member B: "Ok, what about this: you can have X, I can have Y, everyone's happy"
Member C: "Wh...what? X and Y are mutually -exclusive-, you'll make it hell for -everyone- if we have both"
Member A + B: "Two vs 1, we win, go to hell".
A lot of "standards", from all the stuff ISO has, to XHTML/XML/SOAP, stopping in between for things that are not so standards such as all of the accessibility acts and hell, the -law-, is made like this. And thats why it all sucks, and its all out of wack.
Compared to a lot of things that didn't cause so much of a stir, OOXML is a blessing... and thats not saying much. Point is, its nothing new, ISO, and most of the other standard bodies have always done this... this time it was just more visible because it was Microsoft... but anyone who tried to make a company ISO certified to various degree knows: you're better off going to IKEA for clear, sensible instructions.
INK has no business being part of a document format. It's an image format. It should exist as a separate standard on its own. The document format need not know INK specifically but rather provide for a way of including 'images' which both OOXML and ODF do. Then their specs can say "We allow the use of ISO XXXX (aka INK)."
MS doesn't get it. You don't get it. ISO doesn't even seem to get it anymore. It's hysterical that a format that represents exactly 1 commercial interest and has no implementations is published as a "standard." ODF has its failings, but it's already being used as a standard (multiple parties implement it) and it is being evolved with multiple parties in mind. Like a standard or something.
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin
I have not read the OOXML document, but as I understand it, they don't even need to do that. As I understand it, the OOXML 'standard' allows for binary blobs. If that is the case, the 'standard' is simply whatever the hell MS wants wrapped in a readable wrapper. It is simply a standard way to use a non-standard file format.
Because the next step is to decommission ODF. Read the writing on the wall; you have two standards that overlap, and one company that is willing to push any amount of money to get their way. We might yet see Microsoft "agreeing" with its detractors that one standard is better than two--and then you can logically extrapolate from that what their next move will be.
Another version reads: "Two standards good, One standard better!"
Or perhaps summed up clearest: "Embrace, extend, extinguish."
- Roey
Exactly. Governments would do better by their citizens requiring everything to be in HTML format then either ODF or OOXML. Neither ODF nor OOXML has any current market share (unless you want to admit that word is OOXML compliant), where as everyone has a browser, if not more then one.
And HTML is the most widely used XML schema so really it's a twofer.
ISO does a lot more than deal with software standards. Since apparently they have lost all credibility worldwide in every industry thanks to their approval of a half-baked word processing format, I guess your goofy website will also deal with things such as the following:
"ISO has just launched the new ISO Standards collection on CD-ROM â" Materials for the production of primary aluminium. It contains the full collection of 108 ISO standards for materials used in the production of primary aluminium, including standards for alumina, pitch, coke, electrodes, ramming paste and fluorides."
Since of course aluminum smelters the world over will be abandoning the ISO en masse for Certified Open Dot Com.
By the way, openness != standardisation.
...that ISO has a history of being mostly stupid then -> "MPEG is a standard and yet is extremely heavily encumbered with patents."..they should never approve any standard that has patents like that in it. Just because. Unless the patents are then put into the public domain free and clear and unencumbered. Anything else is just kowtowing to some corporation/cartel and their attempts at vendor lockin as a "standard".
I say it is time to just abandon ISO, no longer useful. OOXML is just so glaringly and obviously lame that it stands out now, and they fully deserve all the criticism they are getting. They make US "blackbox voting" look scrupulously fair and honest.
Exactly. No standard is complete at its inception. If Microsoft were truly interested in office software interoperability, it would have worked towards helping improve ODF rather than introducing a competing standard. I respect the fact that Microsoft is a for-profit organization and that its first responsibility is to its shareholders. However, they are doing everyone, including those shareholders, harm in the long run by their actions.