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Denmark Becomes Fourth Nation To Protest OOXML
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "The rumors of a fourth OOXML complaint turned out to be true. Denmark has become the fourth nation to protest the ISO's acceptance of OOXML, and Groklaw has a translation of their complaint. They now join India, Brazil, and South Africa. There are going to be plenty of questions about deadlines, because people have been given two different deadlines for appeals, and the final DIS of OOXML was late in being distributed and not widely available. In fact, that seems to be one of Denmark's complaints, along with missing XML schemas, contradictory wording, lack of interoperability, and troubles with the maintenance of DIS29500. In other words, we should expect a lot of wrangling over untested rules from here on out, and Microsoft knows how to deal with that."
Just a few geeks?
What about governments and businesses that want and need a usable standard? Many governments have to by law put bids up to public tender and cannot specify a precise product. Right now they get locked into a file format that only one company can fully support, they need a standard to make it possible for them to obey the law. Businesses don't like being locked into one supplier who can do anything knowing you have no choice. Other businesses want to be able to compete with Microsoft for those lucrative government and big company contracts.
It seems to me that it is more than just a few geeks.
To the best of my knowledge, the split ordered by judge Jackson was never carried out - because he made unwise comments in public in a moment of anger over Microsoft behavior.
This coward is right. This is only a story about Danes protesting to Denmark and the ISO.
Think global, act loco
No: Denmark has not protested formally. Denmark is represented in ISO by Dansk Standard which, as you may recall, somewhat controversially changed its vote to "Yes".
This is a protest letter from Foreningen af Open Source Leverandører a vendor's association (literally: "The Association of Open Source Vendors", their official English title seems to be "The Danish Open Source Business Association"). They happened to be part of the technical committee (as I understand it, I may be wrong) in Denmark, but are not formal representatives of Dansk Standard.
The recipient of the letter, Jacob Holmblad, is the managing director of Dansk Standard, who also happens to be vice-president of technical management at ISO.
While an interesting complaint, which raises a number of pertinent issues, this is not a formal complaint from a national standards body as those from South Africa, Brazil, and India.
"... what ramifications does ISO's decision actually have?"
A brief summary:
Storing data in an open document format will ensure the accessibility of that data moving forward, regardless of software vendor, changes in the software ecosystem, etc... because anyone will be able to implement their own version of the standard for retrieving the stored data should that become necessary.
With this in mind, governments and institutions around the world are looking at ways they can ensure the accessibility of their documents unconditionally moving into the future. The impact of these new open document format policies will be huge on software purchasing decisions, as any software package used to generate, modify, or read documents will need to comply with the open document format.
Enter MS and OOXML, a document standard that has now been validated by and internationally accepted ISO review procedure.
There are questions about the way the standard was written, whether it can actually be implemented, whether any implementation would require dependence on proprietary MS technology, and whether the dominant MS products would adhere to the strict letter of the standard or break compatibility with non-MS implementations as has happened in other instances with MS implementations.
Finally, there are questions about whether bribery and other underhanded tactics were used to secure a fast track process and passing vote through the ISO process.
If OOXML is allowed to stand there are concerns that MS will effectively achieve lock-in with the governments that opt for OOXML technology, because access to data stored in OOXML documents will remain dependent on MS.
This statement is misleading. Every file written by OpenOffice.org, KOffice or IBM Symmphony (to use common examples) is ODF compliant. The file may not require every tag in the full specification to describe the contents each application is capable of writing, but it will comply with the standard. In other words, each application is fully compliant with the subset of the standard mandated by the application's content creation role.
By contrast, MS Office does NOT write compliant OOXML files at all
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Oh, right. So the national standards bodies of four separate nations are composed entirely of Free Software zealots, and the way we can tell is that they're complaining about the perversion oft he ISO fast track process. So that wouldn't be circular logic, because...?
Ah, so they're useless at law because they don't hold with your favourite untested legal theory. Does the phrase "confirmation bias" mean anything to you?
While we're on, show me where PJ said this, please. It's most unlike her to state anything as legally enforceable - she tends to quote the relevant legislation and then say how she thinks it might be applied.
Well, the obvious thing there is don't read Slashdot if the choice of stories offends you so much. All the same, I'd like to test this particular assertion against the current front page.
Bye Bye Bananas
Ah, yes. Microsoft have announced plans to discontinue support for the popular Banana protocol and announced that all post Vista versions of the OS will only us MS-Kumquat. All that stuff about spreading fungus is clearly FUD spread by astroturfers and MS fanboys in the media. How could I have been so blind?
An Imaginative Use For CCTVs
The point that's not immediately apparent here is that The Get Out Clause were in fact singing songs with pro MSOOXML lyrics. Whoever would have thunk it?
China's All Seeing Eye
Now this one actually mentions Microsoft in TFA. Admittedly it's only one sentence, but that alone should be enough to make the entire articel about Microsoft.
After that, we get this discussion, which obviously is about MSOOXML, then according to my prefs, it's "Seven Failed Foot-Based Game Controllers" and "A Home Lab/Shop For Kids?" I don't think I need to take this one any further.
What can I say? You made me laugh.
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
I live in Denmark, and do read Danish... Usually I'm not reading local tech-news, however I've been reading a little from various Danish news sites and judging from the wording there I don't think you should expect an official appeal.
Also as "spectrokid" says in a comment below you I quote: this country is a notorious Microsoft bitch
The quote you have from the article is not translated correctly in Danish it says: Jacob Holmblad får klagen direkte, fordi han har en fod i hver lejr," forklarer Morten Kjærsgaard til Computerworld. The correct translation would be
Jacob Holmblad receives/gets the complaint directly, because he has a foot in each camp," explains Morten Kjærsgaard to Computerworld He doesn't say that he'll appeal directly. I fact he's quoted for saying that he'd bring the complaint to ISO, at the end of the article.