The Inside Story on Norway's Yes to OOXML

Steve Pepper writes "The former Chairman of the Norwegian ISO committee, who resigned two weeks ago in protest against his country's vote of Yes to OOXML, tells the inside story of how the decision was reached: how a single bureaucrat from Standards Norway sidelined the overwhelming majority of Norwegian technical experts and changed Norway's vote from No to Yes. The story is so surreal it's hard to believe." It's as depressing as it is brief.

Comments

ISO corruption

[Anonymous Coward]

The whole OOXML vote debacle has really showcased corruption of the ISO. Those in the ISO who want to restore the integrity of their organization need to address the massive rule-breaking this vote and Microsoft's role in it present.

Word of advice to ISO: head in the sand is not going to help!!

Re:ISO corruption

[Elektroschock]

The corruption came with ECMA, so ECMA as the ISO parasitarian instrument needs to be removed: no ECMA fast-track without ECMA's special relationship...

Re:Standards Norway's own words

[$RANDOMLUSER]

Actually, I thought this was the most telling line from the article:

The VP asserted that ... the most important thing now was to ensure that OOXML came under ISO's control so that it could be "further improved".

This puts me in mind of that old quote about academia "The fights are so vicious because the stakes are so small".


The delusional hubris of a (European standards group) bureaucrat that they can somehow "control" or "improve" (shit - "influence in any non-quantum way") Microsoft's behavior just makes me groan.

Nothing needs to be done

[QuantumG]

Microsoft have done it for us. The money they paid to push through their "standard" is wasted because the body the standardized it is no longer respected. Their purpose for seeking approval from a standards body has been defeated by the way in which they obtained it.

Re:Nothing needs to be done

[CastrTroy]

But the ISO is also the one who approved ODF. So if ISO is no longer trustworthy, who is left to say what is a good standard. If the whole standards body has lost credibility, where can we go to find out which standards to really use? If a government is looking to mandate open standards in it's document formats, which standards body should they go to to ensure the standards chosen are actually standards?

Re:Nothing needs to be done

[QuantumG]

Presumably a government would want to mandate open standards for a reason.. other than just to be hip.. so they should do what the US military does: demand that there be at least 2 suppliers for software that can read those formats. That should just about immediately eliminate OOXML, as I hear the biggest complaint was that there is parts of it that are just not implementable by anyone but Microsoft.

Re:Nothing needs to be done

[CastrTroy]

Tell that to all the browser makers who implement HTML and CSS. None of them have it 100% correct. Some of them get 100% on Acid 3 (I think anyway), but still that doesn't mean they follow 100% of the standard. I guess there's a difference between "Impossible to implement due to bad definition", and "implementable, but nobody has done it yet". However, I'm sure even Microsoft strays from their own standard in some way or another, so I can't see why they would hold another vendor at fault. Sure they can't possible know what "AutospaceLikeWord95" is actually supposed to do, but they can look at what MS Word does, and make a best guess.

Re:Nothing needs to be done

[rbanffy]

They win either way. If international standard organizations are discredited, Microsoft is more or less free to dictate their own "standards" and claim they are legitimate ones.

I would even risk to say they win _more_ by discrediting ISO than by winning approval on one and only one standard.

Re:Nothing needs to be done

[RelaxedTension]

Anyone except open source programmers, since the license for ooxml is incompatible with the GPL. As well, the patent situation is another large roadblock for open source (not to mention anyone else). So really, not just anyone can use it.

I'm still trying to decide if you're just a Microsoft fanboy, or an actual shill.

Re:Nothing needs to be done

[QuantumG]

bwahaha.. yes, because using someone else's SDK is "implementing the standard".

Re:Nothing needs to be done

[GauteL]

"If they decide to quit supporting OOXML, the OOXML SDK, or fuzzykittens32.lib, guess what? All your code's still going to work."

Only on the same hardware platform and guaranteed only on the exact same version of Windows.

If Microsoft decides to discontinue OOXML and releases a new version of Windows that is incompatible with the OOXML SDK, you will have to re-implement the SDK yourself to allow its use on the new version of Windows. Or even worse, Microsoft just decides to discontinue the SDK without notice while still keeping OOXML within MS Office.

Using the SDK means that your application is completely on Microsoft's terms, complying fully with their licensing requirements for this SDK and you are fully at their mercy when it comes to releases of the SDK.

If you are releasing a competing software package to MS Office, you will not want to leave this much power with your competition.

Re:alternatives..

[domatic]

That is corruptible as well. The trick here is be sure all coders both writer and reviewer FULLY disclose their affiliations. You couldn't even begin to do this Wikipedia style. No pseudonyms, no handles, everybody has to use their real names and digging into and publicly disclosing corporate actions and affiliations would be cricket.

Even then, if 5000 MS coders blatantly write and approve each other how would you propose to handle it?

I suspect the answer here is "Write up what is actually being implemented into an RFC. Any RFC that can't be understood clearly and implemented will be dev nulled." Since many of us are already disregarding the ISO over this, I suppose that is happening already..........

Re:What can be done now?

[dgatwood]

C. Push for a standards body that can't be bought by the highest bidder. Then call for the dissolution of the ISO.

I've thought an awful lot of ISO standards were a joke before. They seem to be more interested in codifying whatever is already being used---no matter how awful---than in actually coming up with standards that are in any way useful. This just confirmed that opinion beyond reasonable doubt....

Frankly, it makes me wonder how much corruption has gone unnoticed in previous ISO standards simply because it was not as blatant....

Just my $0.02.

Re:What can be done now?

[TheRaven64]

You can make it prohibitively expensive to buy a standard. For example, require:

1. A complete test suite for judging compliance.
2. Two independent (no shared code) implementations.
3. One of the implementations to be under a license no more strict than the revised BSD license, and ideally in the public domain.

Then, Microsoft could buy OOXML by 'simply' documenting enough behaviour that it is possible to implement it, writing a set of conformance tests, and funding the development of an open source competitor.