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Unix Group Takes UK Standards Body To Court Over OOXML
superglaze writes "Halfway through the two-month window of opportunity during which OOXML's ISO standardization can be derailed by a formal objection from a national standards body, the UK Unix Users Group is trying to force the British Standards Institution to do just that. According to the Unix Users Group, the BSI used a flawed decision-making process when they chose to approve OOXML in the ISO vote. 'The UKUUG is also folding in many other complaints about Office Open XML (OOXML), such as unresolved patent issues and a lack of completion in the specification's documentation, and is calling for the High Court of Justice to force a judicial review of the BSI's decision.' This is not the first time a country's ISO vote has been challenged."
> The best thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from.
You're damn right. But OOXML is not a standard. A standard has to be documented properly and (which is more important) completely. OOXML satisfies neither of these conditions. So it's not a standard.
> Standing around crying because Microsoft bought a standard...
I'm tired of people like you. Look buddy, we're crying not because "Microsoft bought a standard". We're crying because a half-baked specification got recognized as a standard. We're crying because, in the near future, people will distribute documents in a format that is "according to ISO xxxx-yyyy" but in reality incompletely defined.
Very likely bribed various national delegations so that they'd approve OOXML. In fact, quite a few third-world countries joined the standards process specifically to vote for OOXML, and then do nothing else. Bribery is the only plausible explanation, because approving OOXML otherwise goes strongly against their own self interest (because OOXML is unimplementable by anyone other than (and perhaps even including) Microsoft, and therefore they would be tying themselves to a "standard" controlled by a foreign corporation with no free implementation.
ISO let the bribery and committee-stuffing happen, fast-tracked the process when there was no good reason to do it and many good reasons not to, completely ignored its own processes and procedures during the approval process, gave woefully too little time for comments and debate, ratified the standard despite voting irregularities in several countries, and ignored the public when they pointed all this shit out!
Any other silly questions?
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Saying that the people could care less implies that they actually care about the issue to some degree, which is not what you mean. I see this a fair bit, and wonder why all the fucking nazis around here aren't all over it.
There is plenty of documentation of voting irregularities, which at the very least should be investigated before OOXML can be ratified.
The fast track process is for existing "defacto standards" that are widely used and implemented, and only really need a rubber stamp. OOXML is not widely implemented nor widely used at this point, it should have gone through the normal process. Perhaps the recent standardisation of PDF as ISO32000 was through the fast track, and would have deserved being fast tracked.
According to ISO guidelines, standards should reuse existing standards, preferably ISO ones... OOXML does not, it does mostly the same thing as ODF but in a completely different way, it also stores dates in a way conflicting with existing ISO standards, stores country codes in a different way, stores measurements in a different way and more. Thus it is in violation of ISO guidelines and should not have been approved.
There are other more specific issues, plenty documented out on the web... But the 3 above show where they have violated ISO rules, which should at the very least be enough to kick ooxml off the fast track and into the regular process.
As for ignoring it, unfortunately microsoft are large enough that they can force their inferior format on the market, so it will be impossible to ignore. If the market were free, and people were able to choose products based on technical merit microsoft wouldn't be anywhere near as big as they are.
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There are 3 things.
1: The entire coruption problem. Giving money and other benefits for people/companies so they vote for you is not ok.
2: The entire rush is a big problem. The right way for microsoft to design OOXML as a ISO standard for text documents, would have been to
start the ISO standard work at the same time they started their work on the format. That way Microsoft could have incorporated changes in the standard in their word 2007. Right now what Microsoft word 2007 call OOXML is not really the exactly same document standard as have been declared a standard by iso. The entire point of an iso standard is not "Here is how we at microsoft do things in Word, please declare it a standard"
but insted "How can we design and implement a standard for word text documents, that can represent the things we want".
Example: The standard include a lot of "please behave bug for bug compability with this specific old version of Word. The most infamous example beeing the flag that signal that the document should be layouded exactly with the margin rules that word 95 uses.
The problem here is also one of motivation. The normal motivation for an ISO standard is that a group of vendors and users need a standard they can all use and implement. But microsoft is not really interested in making OOXML the document standard that all word processors use. The only reason they want to make OOXML a iso standard is that they need it for polical reasons because some goverments and companies don't want to use Word unless it save in a "standard format"
3: Nobody know if OOXML can really be implemented by an independent software program. The problem beeing that Microsoft still control patents for parts of the standard that others might not be allowed to use. So it's a standard but Microsoft might still control who can and can't legally implement it.
(The solution for this is simple: Microsoft should just grant the right to use any of their patents that are needed to read and write ooxml software to anyone, but they don't for some reason).
And the standard itself is rather bad some places, but that is to be expected when you try to fasttrack a 8000 pages standard quality do suffer.
Did that explain it?
Here, from all of about 6 posts up the page.
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
--Joe