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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.
The real question for me is what can be done now?
- demonstrations? This is what happened in Norway. Sure it would be good to have them elsewhere.
- Virgils? this is what happened in India and almost on the same level.
- moving on a building teams to stifle OOXML adoption by national governments as their standard
- ???
I second this motion. Can we bring to a vote the matter of incompetence in the ISO voting procedures? Not just because this is about OOXML, but because it is so obviously filled with discontent and deceit.
In most other situations we would call for a 'do over' or call it a false start or some other phrase that describe how wrong and generally unfair it was.
Time for a do-over rule.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
Our second year of CS studies covered these various organizations to a certain degree and the more I learn about their real world conducts, the more they seems like a sham !
As a recent graduate,a strong proponent of open source and above all a decent citizen, how am I supposed to react to news like this and not boycott Microsoft.
The only things that are standard about them are their dirty tactics. Throw me a goddamn chair Mr. Ballmer !
on why & how they changed the vote can be found at their website:
http://www.standard.no/pronorm-3/data/f/0/18/67/6_2401_0/2008-04-01_Standards_Norway_handling_of_the_OOXML_voting_in_ISO__3.pdf
[Senate fills with enormous applause]
Padmé: [to Bail Organa] So this is how liberty dies... with thunderous applause.
No words of wisedom here.
i have to agree and as an American i have to say it is one aspect of my country i am ashamed of...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Many (if not most) similar committees and associations are made up not of the right people for the job, but instead those that were corralled into the positions or couldn't find anything better.
On the other hand, Microsoft's primary goal is to maintain their privileged monopoly wherever and however possible. I actually had an eerie conversation with a Microsoft paralegal, who described her job as "palm-greasing officials in the Asian market". She also described how the executive were no longer concerned with making money, "they're in a position to change the world". I asked her what level of government they planned to get elected, and she replied, "why would they run for office? That would be a demotion!" And that was almost 10 years ago.
Assuming she was giving a truthful account, and her office was directly below Bill Gates, so I imagine she does know what goes on, the Microsoft executive believe that since power is available to them, they are entitled to use their influence wherever and however possible, and that their ability to do so justifies itself.
So show me a group of vigilante multi-billionaires and I'll show you dozens of half-witted committees that bend to their will, despite overwhelming reasoning to do otherwise.
War as we knew it was obsolete
Nothing could beat complete denial
- Emily Haines
I wondered what alternative standards bodies could exist and I tried to find a web peer method that might work.
/. regulars to tell me what a tit I'm being and why it would never work :-(
The best idea I came up with was a standard body for GPL standards based around something like sourceforge.
If people are familier with wide band delphi estimation then this next bit might sound familiar.
Everybody on sourgeforge has a rating determined by amount of code submitted, and any peer review ratings on their code - this then gives them a weighting value for voting. The more technical they are, the more code they submit the higher their rating is. Everybody can then vote on their amendments or proposals for standards and a moderation scheme would run to promote or demote comments based on their ratings. Changes can then be voted in or removed democratically and the best ideas would naturally float up.
The advantages are:-
1. very large audience peer review of any standard
2. best ideas automatically promoted (even if you are a newbie reviewer if you have a good idea then it should gather momemtum of its own and be promoted)
3. system automatically handles voting, promotion, weighting scale and is therefore impartial arbiter.
4. transparency accross the board, everybody can see how the system works
5. if anybody wants to become more influential then they have to donate more source code to be a prolific reviewer. Everybody benefits.
Ok that is an isolated example, and I chose sourceforge as a well known example.
For standards instead of source there would need to be some changes obviously.
But in this day and age, agreeing on a technical international standard seems an excellent candidate for a web based system. In reviewing this kind of thing I have always thought the more the merrier.
Anyhow, only an idea, a pipe dream really.
I now await the
(I also wondered on how the voting would of turned out if the current provess was peer reviewed - i.e. filmed and distributed for all to see on the standards websites.)
Join OOXML forces and show just how devoted you are: In order to preserve the reputation of this beautiful standard, make sure that no company can use the name if they're not 100% compliant with the complete spec. Chances are that no product can claim full OOXML support, not even MS Office. If "OOXML" doesn't appear on any product's feature list, the standard won't matter.
Having not actually implemented the standard myself, I can't really comment on how terrible it is. But I can imagine that if actual information loss was involved, instead of just formatting or whatever, then a government that was looking for a standard to store their documents in would bork at OOXML. They could discover this from doing a test program and seeing if the interoperability of the products that support the standard is actually any good, or they could discover this the hard way after storing documents in one product's implementation of the standard for years and then trying to switch products.
But if, in the end, there's no real need for their documents to be stored in open formats then the only people who really care that the are stored in these formats are shills.
How we know is more important than what we know.
There's an old Steve Jobs quote:
"John Sculley ruined Apple and he ruined it by bringing a set of values to the top of Apple which were corrupt and corrupted some of the top people who were there, drove out some of the ones who were not corruptible, and brought in more corrupt ones and paid themselves collectively tens of millions of dollars and cared more about their own glory and wealth than they did about what built Apple in the first place - which was making great computers for people to use."
What do you think if a do-over was held tomorrow? Who would have voices now?
In Sri Lanka, the first round of voting was a "Yes", but there were more technical input later to the standards committee which made it a unanimous "No" for the final vote. But again there was so much lobbying which made it an "Abstained".
The best part of this scandal is how easily the conspirators got caught. Anybody can blog the truth and their voice will spread and amplify instantly if what they say holds any weight. This is a great demonstration of a new paradigm of security.
This was never the case people!!
This kind of manipulation is as old as the voting system itself. It is possible, it works, and there are some who are extremely good at it. And until yesterday, they could easily get away with it as long as the press didn't side against them. Now, we don't even need the press. We no longer depend on journalists to tell us the story. Whistleblowers no longer wish to remain anonymous, and when an insider demonstrates wrong doing, we listen, we act, and we revolt.
It is only a matter of time before bloggers reach critical mass in politics and everywhere else.
I cannot wait for the day our president is a blogger.