India Third to Appeal ISO's OOXML Approval

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "India is now the third country to appeal the ISO's approval of OOXML, with their appeal arriving just before the deadline last night. According to PC World, this makes OOXML the first BRM process under ISO/JTC 1 to be appealed, which leaves us in uncharted territory. Although there was substantial confusion in the comments on yesterday's story, Brazil is really appealing, not merely disapproving, of OOXML, having sent a letter that begins with 'The Associação Brasileira de Normas Técnicas (ABNT), as a P member of ISO/IEC/JTC1/SC34, would like to present, to ISO/IEC/JTC1 and ISO/IEC/JTC1/SC34, this appeal for reconsideration of the ISO/IEC DIS 29500 final result.' Groklaw speculates that this may have something to do with Microsoft hedging their bets by supporting ODF 1.1 in Office 2007, though we probably won't see any more countries appeal now that the deadline has passed."

Comments

Fast Track

[Gewalt]

If the approval was fast tracked, then the appeal should be too. Get that spec disqualified, FAST.

A 4th appeal is just speculation right now...

[Anonymous Coward]

That's quite a big maybe, but here's what he says in the article you cited:

I have no news as yet whether the fourth country that planned to file an appeal has decided not to do so, missed the deadline, or sent its letter only to ISO (Peter reports that an ISO spokesman declined to confirm how many appeals it has received at this time. The deadline date is a matter of some confusion, as some National Bodies were under the impression that the deadline was June 2, so it remains possible that a fourth appeal will (or already has been) received.

In other technicality news, the IEC spokesman noted that the Brazil letter had been improperly addressed - duplicate copies should have been sent to the CEOs of both the IEC and ISO - but that this technical irregularity would be waived [Jonathan Buck, the IEC spokesman, inaccurately stated to Peter that the Indian appeal, rather than the Brazilian appeal, had been improperly addressed; the IDG story will be corrected shortly]

In other words, it's not surprising there's so much confusion in the reporting, because so many crazy things are going on. We have no proof of a 4th beyond a maybe, and there might be technicalities upon which to disqualify some of these and... Oogh.

- I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property

Yawn... Is This Important?

[SerpentMage]

You know I can understand the reason of why we want to do this. I can even understand why people want a neutral standard. BUT... You know this is so boring because it is not going to help me one ioata...

Yes, yes in the *future* all will better. And we will have solved world hunger, poverty and what have you...

Yes I am frustrated because I F****G wish they would make Open Office a REAL competitor to Office.

For example Calc in OO now has the ability to go beyond 256 columns... Wow, progress! NOT!

Maybe if OO became a REAL competitor Microsoft would think much harder about playing nice!

If you say, "hey you have the sources..." No, I want to pay for a Microsoft competitor!

Re:Fourth country on the way

[Enderandrew]

Given that technology experts in most every country where extremely vocally opposed to OOXML to begin with, I'm shocked that ONLY three or four have filed appeals.

Re:MS losing business to OOo?

[Enderandrew]

Having worked for a few different Fortune 500 companies, OSS is often a dirty word. Executives only trust big names they know.

We only buy Microsoft and Dell for most things. We just bought an expensive Sharepoint Server, when a simple wiki would have saved tons of money. We use Linux, Unix and Solaris only in implementations largely dictated to us by vendors.

I think it makes sense to save money by going to OpenOffice, but corporate America doesn't always make sense.

Re: What?

[hedwards]

Well run corporations don't do that. But corporations the size of Google or MS or IBM have a lot of money at their disposal, I don't believe that any of those 3 couldn't shit an obscene amount of money and still be in business.

Sure, it's a poor way of doing business, shitting money that is, but large corporations do it all the time on stupid stuff. I mean just look at IE and silverlight. You can't say either of those was ever particularly centered on profit. IE alone has probably cost MS billions in terms of extra exploit patching and anti-trust litigation. And even under ideal circumstances, it lacks a way of bringing in money.

Re:MS losing business to OOo?

[ozmanjusri]

corporate America doesn't always make sense.

Which is why they'll be overtaken by hungrier organisations that do make sense.

Re:Three countries wasting taxpayers' money

[Insanity Defense]

I wonder how the citizens feel about their money being wasted on these appeals to satisfy the hatred of Microsoft by a few loudmouthed geek fanboys?

It couldn't possibly be because the proposed standard was too complex and too defective to be fast tracked in the 1st place? Consider that over 80% of the problems with the specification had soloutions proposed by ECMA but "due to lack of time" not reviewed or discussed. The committee should have been able to review and if needed revise those "solutions". The fact that one private body was given unsupervised control of "fixes" when it was supposed to be the committee composed of National representatives that had the actual say to me is a good enough reason to appeal.

All that of course ignores the ongoing scandals and accusations that the system was twisted by Microsofts wealth and power rather than following the rules.

An excerpt from South Africas appeal giving the core of their reasons.

This appeal is made in accordance with Clause 11.1.2: "A P member of JTC 1 or an SC may appeal against any action, or inaction, on the part of JTC 1 or an SC when the P member considers that in such action or inaction:

* questions of principle are involved;

* the contents of a draft may be detrimental to the reputation of IEC or ISO; or

* the point giving rise to objection was not known to JTC 1 or SC during earlier discussions."

We believe that there is an important question of principle involved and that the reputation of ISO/IEC is indeed at stake. There has been speculation about the need to revise the directives around fast track processing. While such revision might indeed be necessary, we cannot accept the outcome of a process which the existing directives have not, in our opinion, been applied.

It appears that they are appealing not to satisfy peoples hatred of Microsoft but because the rules state that appeals should be launched for one of 3 reasons all of which South Africa feels apply.

Re:Fourth country on the way

[FromellaSlob]

Given that technology experts in most every country where extremely vocally opposed to OOXML to begin with, I'm shocked that ONLY three or four have filed appeals. Most of the commitees that were stacked by Microsoft to approve it remain stacked when it comes to appealing.

Remind them that

[Anonymous Coward]

when they ask you to do some free overtime.

They know.

Re:Appeal after the standard was passed?

[Jesus_666]

Yes, but if a country suspects that there have been irregularities they can call schenanigans.

Imagine this: The country of Lithuanistan is a voting member of ISO. United Megacorp has a smaller standards body like ECMA put a standard they cooked up on the ISO fast-track process. Everything proceeds as expected and the Lithuanistanian national body votes YES on the standard, even though most Lithuanistanian techies are very sceptical about it. A week after the vote, though, someone from UniMeg leaks documents that show that the entire Lithuanistanian NB had been bought off by UniMeg and they didn't vote because the standard hat merit but because they liked their new cars.

Lithuanistan is pissed. They want a chance to stop the standardization process (or at least freeze it for further investigation), now that they can prove it has been tampered with. However, all votes have already been cast. This appeals process is what they'd use: If you have doubt that the standardization process went as it should you can appeal before the standard becomes final.