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ISO Releases OOXML FAQ
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "The ISO has put out a FAQ concerning OOXML, but it may raise more questions than it answers. For one, it promises to address problems if they arise in the future. PJ of Groklaw said that's akin to 'selling you a car with four different sizes of tires and assuring that that if you see it's a problem, you can always bring it in for maintenance.' It also handwaves the OSP discriminatory patent promise issues, when asked about contradictions states that some 'may still remain', and asserts that duplicate standards are 'something that need[s] to be decided by the market place.' Notably, the FAQ does not answer the question, 'what the hell were you thinking?'"
... for their NEW international standard, "how to act like a complete jackass when deciding to adopt an international standard."
Eviscerati.Org: All Hail the Eviscerati
A: Sorry, but we can't hear you over the sound of us thumbing through all these big stacks of cash.
The enemies of Democracy are
*shakes fist at lack of edit button*
Eviscerati.Org: All Hail the Eviscerati
I cannot count the times people have asked me "What was the post-BRM voting on ISO/IEC 29500?"
Maybe they should rename themselves the "International Organization for Vague and Undefined Standardization, To Be Decided By The Market"
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
So they're basically saying: "Since we've done a lot of successful standards before, there can't possibly be anything wrong with how this one was carried out."
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
If the Imperial system consisted of definitions like "Measure this like King George III would have", I'm sure people would argue against that being a standard also.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
So Basically OOXML has been fast tracked as a standard because a P-member of the JTC1 proposed to fast-track ISO/IEC 2950 to be adopted as an ISO/IEC standard by the joint technical committee ISO/IEC JTC 1, and this all moved very fast.
Got it.
Until their heads were chopped off, in any case.
Living up to your name, I see.
Two absolutely key requirements for a standard are that it be well specified and possible to usefully implement. The OOXML processes wasn't even long enough for someone to *read* the standard, and all the criticisms that were submitted by standards bodies were ignored in bulk - hence there is *no way* that the ISO could have known that OOXML met those requirements.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
So what you are saying is that ISO is a corrupt standards body. Does that negate the value of ISO standards?
Should the baby be thrown out with the bathwater? And if not, then why only in this one case are you so willing to claim fraud? Surely if fraud was acceptable in this one case, there are other standards which have been similarly fraudulently accepted. And if that is the case, how can any of ISO's standards be acceptable?
For a real head-spin, check out the wikipedia article on pound mass. Here's a quote: "Historically, in different parts of the world, at different points in time, and for different applications, the pound (or its translation) has referred to broadly similar but not identical standards of mass or weight."
The car analogy's already been done for me.
Which is the baby and which is the bathwater?
Pounds-mass predates slugs. Of course it helps that the concept of "pounds" also predates the concept of a distinction between weight and mass.
Because people don't measure their weight. They measure their mass. How much that mass happens to weigh at sea level or somesuch is unimportant, since it's the total quantity of matter that composes you that is the health concern.
But what is curious is that metric-users do use the idea of "kgs force" for things that are force measurements, when a perfectly acceptable newton already exists.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Please show where there is a similar clause in the OOXML standard.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
What people think of the 'standard' is totally relevant. Simply blindly accepting something as the golden rule is ignorant, and this will (probably) lower the esteem of this standards body for a very long time. That is damaging to the purpose of standards, and part of the reason that there are not 47 international standards bodies. Since OOXML is not the only specification out there, it behoves anyone with contrary feelings to promote their favorite standard rather than try to bring down OOXML. Okay, back to your logic problems. How do you promote your own favorite standard without verbally bashing this one that is trying to supplant the good value of your favorite standard?
Yes, I know that sounds like being negative, but you must remember that using OOXML as a design example of what standards SHOULD NOT BE is a valid method to promote the standard of your choice.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
Well I can dream can't I ?!?
"We are incompetent, irrelevant and corrupted, and we have a deep attachment to all that."
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
it is also quite a health concern what force is acting on my quantity of matter. That's why I use the scale every morning to check if the earth's gravitation is still within healthy limits
George III never had his head chopped off! He was the one that chatted to trees.
We've seen blatant, ample evidence that this was a bought vote. We've seen MS bribe normally uninterested countries into voting their way. We've seen them manage to fast-track a standard when it is obviously due more scrutiny (if nothing else, due to its larger size compared to the earlier ODF standard). And we've seen *blatant* vote tampering with Norway, which voted yes despite a majority of its technical advisors voting no.
The ISO's complicity in all this cheating is plain and obvious to anyone who cares to look. Their attitude of blaming the observers is, frankly, insulting to the morals and intelligence of anyone who is speaking the truth.
Yes, this does bring suspicion on the validity of the other standards. However, the other standards do not have the blatant, obvious process tampering that this one did, nor (to my knowledge) the enormous, unscrupulous corporation with an interest in seeing the standard passed.
Microsoft wanted an ISO standard so they could still sell to governments who now require open standards (and the many who will do so in the future).
They used money and pressure on companies to get them to vote, and tied up the obviously inadequate procedures of ISO organisation until it agreed to do what they wanted.
So, they win, we lose, this decision will never be reversed, because to do so would destroy ISO's credibility in the wider world (not just this one issue, which many ISO using organisations still likely don't know about).
Now, ISO are trying to save face. This will work, because too many people have a vested interest in ISO not being discredited for it to fail. If failure is announced by the techie press, they will simply ignore it and carry on.
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
We reviewed the process before it started, all the while during its course and afterwards as well. In other words:
"Our review process sucks so much that we can't even spot the most blatant and obvious abuse in our entire history right while it's going on under our noses."
Thanks, ISO. That removes my final doubts regarding your reliability and competence. Only leaves me to wonder how you're getting anything done right at all.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
...if ISO was paid in euros or dollars. You'd probably want to fast-track to this degree if your bribe goes down in value the longer you take.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I don't know much about the ISO process or about previous ISO standards, but it's entirely possible that this is the first time that an ISO standards process has been gamed so thoroughly.
There is evidence that multiple new countries signed up as ISO members *specifically* to vote in OOXML. If so, that's an extremely large scale procedural attack. If this is the first time that a procedural attack on that scale has been attempted, then the whole situation only implies that the ISO wasn't prepared to withstand an attack of that magnitude (and now are trying to cover their asses in response).
Now, if that is what occurred and the ISO goes on refusing to admit to the problem rather than trying to fix it then the ISO name will no longer be worth trusting - but the ISO still has a month or so to make a procedural catch on this issue, fix the problem, and save their reputation.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
"A number of such claimed contradictions were identified...//...It is possible that others may still remain, but these can be taken care of during the maintenance of the standard."
Am I to interpret this as meaning that when they find problems with the standrad, they will change the standard to 'fix' it?
If my interpretation is correct, I wonder where this leads us. I could end up having bought a number of licences for some software that conforms to the standard, only to find, a month or two later, that they have altered the standard.
Since there is a great deal of movement in the EU to accept only standardised file formats, where would this leave me and my umpteen licences? When I bought the software it followed the standard, but does not later. Can I expect the manufacturer to provide me a free upgrade/patch, or is my software to be considered still standards-compliant, or will I simply have to fork out more money for the latest, currently compliant, version?
And the situation gets more interesting when you reverse it: suppose I get the absolutely latest version of some compliant software, and save a file that I send to someone with an older, now not compliant, version of the same software. How should this older version handle my file? should it spit out an error message: "I cannot open this standards compliant file, because the standard has been updated too much"? Or should it open the file and do the best it can? Or should it notify the user that this particular file is newer than the software and might not render correctly?
I can't help but think that a lot of potential problems would have been avoided if the work around this particular standard had been allowed to take it's time, so that a technically sound standard was accepted.
Standards should be allowing open markets to flourish and they can't do this if the depend solely on a given operating system, environment or application. They can't do this when they allow proprietary extensions willy nilly. Where's this mentioned in the FAQ? The "market place" didn't decide diddley squat. ISO had a opportunity to give the âoemarket placeâ a chance but instead decided to assist a proven abusive and monopolistic company in it's bid to remain to moving target when it comes to being interoperable and compatible. How the hell does ISO get it's funding anyway? I sure hope it ain't public. The funding should be cut off. Anyways, I'm sure Microsoft will be more than willing to take up the slack.
It's among the vaguest documents I've ever read. All it ensures is "licences with other parties on a non-discriminatory basis on reasonable terms and conditions." IANAL, but it seems like the word "reasonable" leaves far too much room for interpretation.
Cite an example where there was a question over the voting practices in on of the IEEE 802.11x standards.
Linux is not a standard, just like Windows NT is not a standard, it's software.
The right to protest the State is more sacred than the State.
Let's end the whole those-ISO-guys-are-idiots. Every person who is impartial and technical has completely denounced the OOXML-trainwreck as a standard, and unfortunately, these are not the people who are in control to release documents like this. Clearly MS has more of a foot-in-the-door than we'd like (after all, OOXML passed), and it's these same threads they're pulling to get news releases like the BS "ISO OOXML FAQ", and "ISO Calls for Ceasefire of Personal Attacks."
MS has ISO exactly where they want it. They have the right people in their pocket, and the people who aren't in their pocket get fed up and leave, thus making the overall MS-influenced-members-to-impartial-members ratio just that much higher. But the point is, the people releasing the documents like this FAQ are not idiots. They know exactly what's going on (there's no way they couldn't know) and everything is carefully planned out. (yes, I'm a conspiracy theorist, but it's tough not to be in this case)
The real question is how to bring ethics and order back to an organization which is flooded with bad members. A lot of rules or exceptions that could be used to help the impartial minority take back over, will also help the bad guys trigger false alarms and disrupt the process when they are in the minority. Honestly, I haven't come up with a solution to this conflict, yet. At least not without a higher-level government intervention which forces a reorganization, or a law is passed somewhere to ban members who have a conflict-of-interest.
They were thinking they could buy off the ISO. Were they wrong?
Lets face it, standard or not the OOXML purpose of going through all this was to win contracts otherwise off-limits to MS. If Office can support OOXML, agreed with some slight "interpretations", they are now able to sell more. I believe other vendors better wake up to this and leverage this standard as fast as possible to keep up.
This is also a way to limit IBM's influx of ODF usage in the same circles. MS recognizes that IBM's services on Linux/Websphere is slowly making inroads for some SOA platforms. Either OOXML or ODF could be the standard for human-generated content throughout that platform. ODF itself has issues of interpretation, but of course nowhere near as high as OOXML - at the moment. Simply put, its just a bit further along on the process of hammering out the bumps. In the end though, I expect platforms to need support for either format.
Remember kids, this is just one a series of salvos that land on a marketeer's bullet point slide. There are many more, like support, pools for technical resources, openness, etc. If a government office decides that OOXML is fine as a format for document exchange, then they should still be able to pick and choose the components that run the services. Short version: One has to support both of these formats, and a whole lot of other technology "standards" to really be an enterprise-ready product.
Don't confuse the battles for the war.
Excellent analogy, Chandon.
Yes, ISO was essentially owned by a 0-day. That's bad enough. But much worse is the part where they pretend nothing happened, no damage was done, everything is alright - instead of fixing the hole and undoing the damage.
I know what I'd think about a sysadmin who acts that way with his system. I tend to think the same about ISO now: Incompetence, corruption and stupidity.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
At present it doesn't seem that the end users, developers or really anybody other than MS is going to benefit from having an additional standard to use. Especially one that's as complicated as the OOXML spec apparently is. In some respects it's somewhat unfortunate that this isn't Apple, because iSO would be such a good tag.
I'm just waiting to hear what happens with the Norwegian complaints. I don't think that the deadline for them challenging their vote has expired yet.
ODF: 5+ applications can write the format.
OOXML: Zero applications can write the format.
ODF Wins!
That memory makes me wonder if these ISO buffoons have the same King George tendency for conversations with the flora, or perhaps if you're more cynical they were looking at trees wondering how many benjamins could be made out of them.
So the ISO have FAQed up the issue of OOXML. This is old news, surely.
As is a bigoted, insensitive, shallow asshole.
The FAQ is all about not fixing it. They're rationalizing about how they have great process and how they have to accept the result of that process. The fix is in.
And Microsoft? Now that they've built this grand machine for subverting ISO do you expect them to use it once and then throw it away? Not likely. Their duty to their shareholders and all that...
You can stick a fork in the ISO. They're done.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
IETF requires demonstrated interoperability using prototype reference implementations before they will adopt a standard.
ISO generally first adopts standards, then waits for people to prototype implementations and discover the bugs in the standard (unless someone walks in with existing technology and asks for it to be standardized). When people start reporting that aspects of the standard can't be implemented, ISO works on fixing it.
After ISO adopted the Open System Interconnection (OSI) standards, they had to set up "implementers' workshops" to figure out how to make their newly adopted standards workable. (The OSI standards are the 7-layer reference model and related protocol suite that were pushed aside by the Internet protocol suite, a.k.a TCP/IP. Many OSI protocols were never fully implemented or never made to work.)
The workshops met (one was sponsored by NIST) and produced a lot of documents on things that needed to be done to make OSI work. When the Clinton/Gore administration came into office, they killed US government support for the OSI protocols and told its agencies to use the Internet protocols.
There's also evidence that multiple new people signed up *specifically* to vote against OOXML - it cuts both ways.
... and anybody else shouldn't, either.
Unless they cancel the Standardization of OOXML immediately and furthermore establish a reasonable code of conduct for itself and for all the national bodies that are entitled to vote.
Someone finally did see the idiocy of that system and got around to actually fixing it. Probably somewhere around 300 years ago.
I'm guessing here, but Imperial measurements have probably been in use for 1000 years.
So in 700 years, OOXML will be a real standard, but with lots of cruft and heavy penalties in maintaining anything that uses it, especially if you have to convert to ODF.
It was a joke. Why are you on Slashdot? Don't you have some fem-nazi rally to attend or shouldn't you be bragging to your hippie friends how you have a negative carbon foot print?
Yes, this does bring suspicion on the validity of the other standards.
I don't think ISO realizes how much damage they've done to themselves here. ISO certification is supposed to guarantee that no matter what, your process is sound. ISO's own process has failed here, and everybody knows it. If ISO themselves can't even adhere to an ISO process, what value is their certification? What value is any ISO standard?
Some believe that the original measurement of the English foot was from King Henry I, who had a foot 12 inches long; he wished to standardise the unit of measurement in England. However this is unlikely, because there are records of the word being used approximately 70 years before his birth (Laws Ãthelstan). This of course does not exclude the possibility that this old standard was redefined ("calibrated") according to the ruler's foot. In fact, there is evidence that this sort of process was common at least in earlier ages. In other words, a new important ruler could try to impose a new standard for an existent unit, but it is unlikely that any king's foot was ever as long as the modern unit of measurement. (emphasis mine)
I was referring to clauses in OOXML such as "FormatLikeWord95".
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Do any of the mouth breathers here complaining understand what standards are? So it is a standard, so what. You aren't required to follow it simply because it is a standard. It just means that the thing is documented and agreed upon. IF you claim to use it, you have a clearly documented standard. Good, bad, or otherwise it is documented. Like Betamax and VHS or HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. All are "standards" (granted these may have patent components). This is really a non-issue. MS applied for a standard, follow procedure and got their standard. People seem to think it somehow invalidates all other document formats and forces them to comply solely with ooxml.
That stuff isn't in OOXML any more, it was removed during the standardization process (because people complained that it didn't belong in the spec).
Now it lives in a technical annex to the document that describes all the legacy behavior.
I would be interested to know how many pages the next-longest standard ran that was approved for fast-tracking.
Dan.
"IShOt the standard, but I did not shoot A-N-S-I"
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
A bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
Part of the reason for ISO standards is so a product can be deemed standards compliant. Is it ISO itself that determines whether an individual product complies to the standard?
I'm curious, because I've heard that no product, including Microsoft's, currently follows the OOXML standard... and I wonder if there's a chance they never will? I suspect it may not be possible.
Or are Microsoft products going to be rubberstamped for the approval process as well, even if their implementation is buggy?
If that's true, it just makes the credibility of the voting results even worse.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
... but it gets me every time. :)
Eviscerati.Org: All Hail the Eviscerati
you're doing it wrong. first you need to compare your mass to a reference using a balance scale, THEN you use a spring scale to measure the weight force (in newtons) your body produces. with the two values at hand, you divide your weight by your mass, and the result should be 9.8
using only a spring scale in your bathroom simply won't tell you anything, unless you calibrate it everyday with copy of the international prototype kilogram (IPK).
man, this is the second time in less than a week that i post something absolutelly pedantic... should i start to worry ?
What ? Me, worry ?
i'd mod you up, but I want to comment elsewhere in the thread. AC cause this is willfully offtopic...
It uses standards, notable POSIX, but it itself is not a standard.
I'm not going to pretend I know that much about this, but that is my fear too...if ISO continues to defend this decision they are risking a loss of good faith, or perhaps a loss of confidence. The publicly known irregularities should be enough for ISO to admit they made a mistake and restart the standardization process. I think anything "fast-tracked" should be considered suspicious.
Win a signed Stephen Carpenter ESP Guitar from the Deftones: http://def-tag.com/?r=0008781
... to prevent people from altering their posts in ways that will make the rest of a thread impossible to understand. There is a particularly clever kind of trolling where someone creates a rabidly inflammatory post, waits until a horde of people have responded to the over-the-top comments in that post, and then re-edits the original so that the criticism is a lot more even-tempered... which makes it appear that the people who are responding to the post in its original form have gone off the deep end. Not being able to edit your posts pretty much makes that impossible.
Eviscerati.Org: All Hail the Eviscerati
He's trying to make an analogy to the tags similar in nature to "DoSomeFormattingLikeWord5" which exist (although deprecated) in OOXML.
Better analogy: some rich guy pays a dog walker to have a Saint Bernard shit in your yard.
You don't take the turd inside and call it your baby.
OOXML is a bought-and-paid-for turd. ISOldout indeed.
(Appropriately, the captcha is "shovel". Too damn bad there isn't one big enough in the entire universe to shovel the OOXML turd out of existence...)
I've looked but have been unable to find such evidence. From what I've read, the countries that joined the p-member group at the last minute and haven't voted since the OOXML vote, all voted FOR OOXML with the exception of one abstain. Can you give me any specifics to point me in the right direction?
I believe that they were used as the TLDs for countries. However most people will look for
Mind you the United States of America is not abbreviated to "" in common parlance or by the standard. Few people I know of use
I can't remember hearing much beating of breasts over that recently.
As is often said: "The great thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from" (1)
So there are "good" ISO standards and there are "bad" ones.
Oh, and is it ISO or OSI - what's the standard here: should Francophones be forced to use ISO or Anglophones OSI? I wouldn't dream of comparing French and English to ODF and OOXML but if someone were to do so, then which would match up with which?
----
(1) Many people, probably including Anon.
Nope. Never used Kilos for force.
...
Kilos for mass and Newtons for force. End of chat!
I do also use "Rule of Thumb" and "Imperial" mensuration systems as well though
There's evidence -- circumstantial though it may be -- that entire COUNTRIES signed up their standards committees as P members to vote for the proposed OOXML standard. There's a difference between that and individual companies joining a national committee to vote one way or the other.
Now, with respect to those individual companies, I would never dream of saying that Google is not 100% capable of reviewing the proposed standard independently and deciding it's of poor enough quality that they must to join the committee in order to vote against it.
I similarly cannot say with 100% certainty whether or not the other companies who joined those same committees and happened to have contracts with Microsoft and who voted for the proposed standard were capable of and did independently review the proposed standard before voting.
FYI: In the interest of fairness, I will state that I do work for IBM, but these are my own opinions.
So you're saying that fat chicks in space are bigoted, insensitive, shallow assholes?
I am terified of the ooXML ruling
a. ISO has publicly stated that it will revoke ISO clasification if Microsoft does anything not abiding by their rules.
However if my company invests 1-2 years and thousands of dollars into supporting and maintaining documents in ooXML
We would be locked to the ISO ooXML format now however is MS does start suing software developers implementing ooXML
Sure ISO will strip MS stature but MS will have already created a large ooXML user base with high investment.
and due to patent suits MS Office will be without competitors again.
Even if it's legacy behaviour, it still needs to be described. My understanding is that it was moved to the "deprecated" section, meaning older documents conforming to an earlier version of the specification -- but still the standard -- may have this behaviour (although new ones will not). Thus, anyone wanted to process those will need to implement it needs to know how to do it... and it's still not described in terms that don't reference a Microsoft product?
In addition, how can a standard that hasn't been implemented have a section on legacy behaviour?
But that does not excuse ISO. On receipt of this monster ISO could have laughed, refused it, and revoked their recognition of ECMA as a standard setting body for cause. They could have used a less harsh method of censure amounting to "get away from me kid, I've got work to do."
ISO didn't do that. Instead it went through the drama in three acts that was the validation of this garbage. Now in this FAQ they tell us they monitored the process quite closely all the way through. That means they observed all of the shenanigans in real time and allowed them complicitly. At the end they tell us how proud they are of their process. Since the whole way through the rules changed at every step dynamically to force the approval and silence dissent they imply that was their intent and the result is the one they desired: approval at any cost.
The price of "approve at any cost" appears to be their credibility. Now they've no credibility left and ECMA has none to lend them.
The status of international standards body of record is a prestigious one. With it comes a hefty responsibility. You don't get to blame the other guy. The other guy is not ISO.
They're toast.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
What about ISO safety standards ? Should I be concerned that some of the safety standards may be purely motivated by company profits rather than actual safety ? Is my ISO certified bicycle helmet actually safe or is it "safe" for some companies profit ? Maybe we need a new standards org for safety standards as it seems ISO can no longer be trusted.
Doesn't it look like a stick-figure playing air-guitar? Sans font
Coincidentally, it goes with the theme.
Adapt, adopt, or get out of the way!
Or cubit's "Measure this like Noah would have". Historically most forms of measurement were based on how someone else would have measured it. Most forms of measurement are based on body proportions or walking speed.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
If competing standard need to be decided by the marketplace, then what the hell do we have an ISO for?!
EXACTLY WHAT I WAS THINKING!
From TFA: >> while others claim that ISO/IEC 29500 provides additional functionalities, particularly with regard to legacy documents. Yeah. Legacy documents in a standardized format, that render the same on every platform and with every implementation, right? Most Office2k3 and OfficeXP/2k documents I've seen do *not* work in the other version (not even from the old version to 2k3).
Don't you know what those O's stand for? Open Open XML! See? Double open! It must be very open! Way more open than ODF, which only has one O (and what's a DF anyway?)
That's: "Questions We Wish People Were Frequently Asking".
No sig today...
I hadn't thought shooting oneself in the foot was fatal. In the case of the ISO and its manifestly dishonest dealings with respect to OOXML, I may be mistaken.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Here at RarkCO Enterprises International, we are PROUD to have been ISO 9000 certified. After a lengthy, disruptive and expensive ISO 9000 audit, all of our processes are documented in detail and our ISO 9000 audit demonstrates that we are a leader in our industry in JIT process, financial controls and market transparency. Furthermore, our risk management controls are top tier and our customers and shareholders value our rigid adherence to the highest standards of quality and honesty... --- HEY! WTF??
(THUD!!! CRASH!!! (sounds of secretaries screaming))
** HANDS UP! FREEZE! THIS IS THE FBI! **
(sounds of handcuffs being locked)
um...gotta go...
[Insert pretentious and semi-clever sig here: ______ ]
Where the hell can I get some of that awesome crack you've been smoking!?
If we're to have any chance of restoring order then we need to convince a national standards body to appeal. And if you can't convince them, convince the local authorities to make them, in the name of competition.
No point sitting here complaining - do something about it!
System report: Everything is fine. Nothing is ruined.
http://outcampaign.org/
The ISO recently released FAQs on ISO/IEC 29500 (Apr 2008; www.iso.org) in defense of their approval of the contentious Microsoft OOXML. Their core rationale has been included:
1) How could a 6 000-page document be fast-tracked?
'Ecma International considered that the fast-track procedure was appropriate... The number of pages of a document is not a criterion cited in the JTC 1 Directives...'
2) Why would ISO and IEC allow two standards for the same subject?
'After a period of co-existence, it is basically the market that decides which survives.'
3) What about hidden patent issues?
'...patent policy requires that licenses be available on reasonable and non-discriminatory terms...and that all identified patent owners make a declaration to that effect.'
4) What about contradictions with other ISO and IEC Standards?
'...the final decision on whether there are contradictions and how to resolve them rests with the national members of ISO and IEC.'
5) How are national votes formed?
'ISO and IEC national members... are fully responsible for the way national votes are formed...'
6) What was the post-BRM voting on ISO/IEC 29500?
'There was no post-BRM voting, but only the possibility of changing a previously submitted vote.'
7) Will ISO and IEC review how ISO/IEC 29500 was adopted?
'We reviewed the process before it started, all the while during its course and afterwards as well... ISO and IEC have collections of more than 17 000 and 7 000 successful standards respectively...'
Conclusion
The ISO would like to assure the public they followed protocol. Unwittingly, ISO presents a blueprint of how a powerful entity has raped and sodomized their process. Inferred are MS tactics of overwhelming with excessive and convoluted documentation and fast tracking; sidestepping patent issues and the previous established standard; and aggressive lobbying and stacking national votes 'all the while' being under review. We feel for you ISO; MS has been stickin' it to all of us for a long time. This is why ODF was originally brought before you.
ISO reputation has been tarnished to the extent they need reminding from the public:
a) ISO has certified the very antithesis of a definitive 'standard'; they have sanctioned monopolistic control
b) 'No fault' is not the same as 'accountability', which requires addressing the politicking and tactics used to undermine fair processes
c) Failure to enact procedural changes ensures repeated abuse and continued repudiation
The ISO might begin by reviewing their own mission statements which includes:
i) 'ISO is derived from the Greek isos, meaning 'equal''
ii) 'Create 'a level playing field' for all competitors on those markets'
iii) 'Safeguard consumers, and users in general, of products and services'
We hope ISO can rise to the occasion and salvage their reputation, and address the international need for a truly open and free standard in electronic documentation.
In further news, Microsoft Word is now being adopted as the standard wordprocessor.