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."

Comments

Re:This molehill is gigantic!

[BadAnalogyGuy]

I thought the advantage of standards was to reduce divergence in systems. The more implementations of particular items, such as screws, conform to a standard, such as phillips head, the better it is for the people who use screws.

You'd be incorrect. The advantage of a standard is that it provides a set of guidelines that define an implementation. If an implementation supports a certain standard (or standards), then it can be reasonably expected to work as specified.

There is no reason to believe that only one specification may be supported in a product or (more generally) a market ecosystem. SGML still exists despite XML's rapid emergence. Even your beloved screw head has many different standards which are mixed and matched in products as necessary.

The only valid point against OOXML is that it contains unclear and/or unimplementable aspects, thus denying others from the ability to create supporting implementations. However, if this is the case, and MS is unwilling to create OOXML implementations for non-MS/Apple platforms, how successful do you really expect the standard to be?

In the end, government documents are write-only. The only thing that matters is the final output, so there's really no point in fighting over file formats since the documents will be archived in a completely non-RW format anyway (like PDF).

The UKUUG taking legal action over the corruption in the vote doesn't make them look like whiners. It makes them look like learned elders who are about to take a stick to a bunch of delinquents.

No, it looks like they are whining over a decision that didn't go their way.

Protest against the standardization of OOXML doesn't appear technologically backwards when conducted in an appropriate forum and it portrays OOXML as the backwards step it truly is.

No, it just says to onlookers that Microsoft's standard is so advanced that even the best and brightest of the computing world can't implement the difficult parts of it. Of course this is due to bad inclusions, but it doesn't make you come off any better by crying about it.

This is about a format to be implemented by anyone who can read a specification

Really? And you were expecting someone besides MS to implement OOXML? On top of that, you were expecting someone to buy an implementation of OOXML that was not developed by MS? Look at all these windmills, Don Quixote!

A reasonable open standard already exists.

Of course you mean PostScript, right?

Of course you haven't seen them, they're all 0/-1.

[SEMW]

Except, as has been pointed out here in the past by people who actually went through and read it, the OOXML "documented" standard is full of references to microsoft office internals, which _aren't_ documented in it. Except, as pointed out by people in comments on this article, those items have been flagged and fixed as per the comments raised on the initial draft. Would that be TFA, of this slashdot discussion? I can't find any references to flagging or fixing in TFA, and a vague reference to an ongoing slashdot debate is hardly authoritative. A quote or a link might be helpful.
Personally, I haven't heard about any comments being addressed in the MSOOXML spec. The reason you haven't seen any of the relevent references in any Slashdot discussion is that they're invariably modded down to 0 or -1, because Slashdot modders don't like it when reality disagrees with their anti-Microsoft POV. E.g., here's a link to someone quoting from the documentation for autoSpaceLikeWord95. Since, as any Red-blodded True Slashdotter will tell you, autoSpaceLikeWord95 is undocumented, quoting from the documentation is liable to disturb Slashdotters' world-view; it's easier to just stick your fingers in your ears, moderate down, and pretend it didn't happen.