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."

Comments

Farewell ISO

[symbolset]

Will noone step up and defend the credibility and proud history of ISO here? They have done good work in the past. Cannot someone defend the way they've handled this?

No?

Anybody? Anybody at all?

I thought not.

Reputation. 60 years to build and 6 months to burn down.

Goodbye ISO.

Re:Farewell ISO

[ushering05401]

"Goodbye ISO."

From a more optimistic slant:

ISO is being forced to address certain issues for the first time, and the outcome could be a more robust and impartial standardization process.

I'm not predicting a better future for ISO, just refusing to believe that all is lost.

Re:Farewell ISO

[Anonymous Coward]

You seem to have overlooked the fact that this is an issue nobody cares about except for a few geeks. ISO was here long before you were born, and they'll be here long after you're gone. Common sense being moderated down in 3, 2, 1...

Re:Farewell ISO

[ozmanjusri]

Will noone step up and defend the credibility and proud history of ISO here? They have done good work in the past. Cannot someone defend the way they've handled this?

No?

I don't understand this "blame the victim" mentality that's pervasive in Slashdot discussions on this.

Microsoft deliberately subverted ECMA, a number of national standards bodies as well as ISO itself. The influence they brought to bear was unprecedented, and ISO simply was not designed to deal with it. The fast track process was abused to prevent a reasonable response, and the short deadlines are being used to the same effect in this protest phase.

It was a deliberate, calculated attack on an unprepared target.

And ISO is not alone - look at all the governments and departments MS has bought or influenced over the years.

Whether ISO can recover from this is questionable now. Responding correctly will be hard because the committees are still stacked with Microsoft reps. They're like a rooted box - untrustworthy without some extensive malware cleaning.

If this is evidence for anything, it's that Microsoft is out of control and must be split up.

Re:Farewell ISO

[Anonymous Coward]

You seem to have overlooked the fact that this is an issue nobody cares about except for a few geeks

Microsoft earn 4 billion american dollars every 3 months from Microsoft Office. So the question is -- are they earning their money any more? Are they a lean mean competitive company with competitive pricing? Or are they -- for example -- a monopoly, turning on their customers and trying to lock them in to artificially high prices?

They suck 4 billion every 3 months out of the worlds economy.

The people who care about this are usually the big customers, the governments, who spend hundreds of millions on this. The geeks are angry about bad technology, but don't discount the governments who want out from this monopoly because they're more angry than you can imagine. Even Microsoft have admitted that the fast-track process has resulted in a standard they can't use until it's fixed and that this won't be done until 2011.

This process is a shame, and anyone who wants out from this monopoly cares about it. CIOs and IT policy makers care about this, and yes geeks care about this. And more importantly ihbt, ihl, hand.

Re:Farewell ISO

[Anonymous Coward]

So, if someone were to going out in -20C weather without wearing a coat, and then caught a cold, would we avoid blaming the victim?

The ISO is a credibility body. They brand a "standard" with their good name. If they recommend something that has no business being a standard (in present condition) then the ISO's credibility will suffer... It may not be their fault (entirely) but it is definitely their problem!

Re:Farewell ISO

[Kjella]

Cannot someone defend the way they've handled this? No? Anybody? Anybody at all?I thought not. On slashdot? Not without an asbestous suit. Look at it from ISOs point of view - they had a lot of large companies voting for OOXML. Stuffed or not, many national bodies voted yes. What do you expect, an ISO tzar sitting on top to say "We'll take your votes under advicement, but we'll do whatever the f... we like and reject it anyway"? Like in a court, almost no matter how badly the case was botched it's the parties that has to appeal, not the judge. That's what happening now, and the appeals process can get all the dirty laundry and breach of process out in the open.

Reputation. 60 years to build and 6 months to burn down. Goodbye ISO. Yeah sure, an organization that makes thousands of standards is going to burn down over one mishandled one. I wonder if you'd like to try that standard on anything else, for example Congress. If we burned them down every time the process was subverted by riders or they passed unconstitutional laws or just did things that in retrospect were considered horrible, horrible screwups we wouldn't have time to rebuild before we'd have to burn them again. Go easy on the hyperbole, the world is not about to end. If all appeals fail and OOXML is finally approved, there will still be a reckoning in ten years or so that this was a mistake. Having standards is too important though, burn down ISO and you'll have even more paid shills like ECMA take their place.

Re:Farewell ISO

[TubeSteak]

From a more optimistic slant:

ISO is being forced to address certain issues for the first time, and the outcome could be a more robust and impartial standardization process. ISO has already blown it @ the State level.
Their rules were not setup to deal with an actively aggressive entity like Microsoft.

Maybe things will get fixed at the National level, but the organization as a whole has been tainted by the abuses visited upon the individual member States. The only way they can regain their credibility is for each country to implement robust rule changes.

ISO doesn't just certify software.
Maybe the next poorly conceived ISO spec to get railroaded through will have real world safety implications.

Re:Farewell ISO

[pembo13]

The victims shouldn't stand-up and defend the perp after the fact. If they really are the victim, let them reveal their rapist, or lie in shame.

Re:Farewell ISO

[Insanity Defense]

Funny, Office 2007 came out 'recently', as did 2008 for Mac. Did they put any money into that they are entitled to attempt to recoup?

They are definitely entitled to attempt to recoup their costs. The problem comes from their control of the market place which gives them the ability to compel expenditures and to use that compulsion to recoup their costs instead of letting the market decide if they deserve to recoup them.

Governments and businesses are entitled to control their own expenditures and to decide what format their data will be stored in. Right now Microsoft is working to compel them to change that data format because Microsoft desires it. Naturally that is being resisted. Governments and businesses are slowly beginning to say "It MY data and I WILL control it". Microsoft is like the Outer Limits control voice demanding that in fact they will control your data.

Re:Farewell ISO

[Kalriath]

Noone. If you create a product you are entitled to charge what you want for it, and people are entitled to not buy it. And if anyone tries to send you a Word document (just like it anyone tries to send me a WordPerfect document), feel free to tell them to send you a TXT file.

Re:Farewell ISO

[NickFortune]

And if the outcry were limited Slashdot and Groklaw then you might have a point. However, the outcry I'm referring to is that raised by the standards bodies of Denmark, India, Brazil and South Africa. Oh, and the UKUUG too, although they're just taking the BSA to court rather than protesting the result.

So, unless you think that Slashdot has somehow unfairly subverted these bodies, then I think you'll find you're wrong on that one.

As for Groklaw, PJ is a paralegal bu training, and at least two of the Groklaw regulars are are qualified lawyers, either practicing or retired. So it's kind of hard to see how you come to the conclusion that they know nothing about law.

Hmm... Not doing very well, are we?

Re:Farewell ISO

[Samgilljoy]

I don't understand this "blame the victim" mentality that's pervasive in Slashdot discussions on this.

It's highly tendentious to characterize the ISO as a "victim." It would be just as easy to call it a body of accomplices. What use is such an organization, if they can't even handle the entities whose products they are supposed to judge? At best, they're incompetent, not poor victims bedazzled by city slickers.

This "victim" crap is the same trope people trot out to excuse failures on the part of people who belong to some group many are afraid to criticize. You want to blame Microsoft; you don't want to blame the ISO, so suddenly this standards body is a poor passive entity tossed hither and thither by forces too great for it to withstand. You get the exact same crap, when someone from a marginalized segment of society fails in some major way. Oh, it's not their fault, they are just at the whim of greater forces, no responsibility, no blame. BS.

If you want them to be "victims," then you have to accept their weakness and incompetence, which condemns them just as thoroughly as if they are knowingly complicit.

Re:zzz

[superslacker87]

Yes, but I'm glad that there is some exhibiting of common sense. Even /. itself had an article that stated even Microsoft won't be supporting OOXML until two versions from now. When they won't even fully support their own standard in the next version of MS Office (Version 13.0/20xx), how do they expect other software developers to do the same?

Re:I value your opinion

[ozmanjusri]

It was important that the first comment not be some GNAA garbage.

It was, but it's even more important that people realise the problem is Microsoft, not ISO.

As long as they are allowed to continue wielding the amount of power they do today, they will corrupt ANY standards body. It's simply not possible to design a consultative standards body that's immune to the type of panel and committee stacking we've seen from Microsoft on this issue.

Yes, ISO is now badly damaged, and that's a tragedy all of it's own, because ISO was a body of great value to the whole world. Now the world needs to be looking at clipping the wings of the predator that did the damage, not at sinking the boot into a crippled ISO.

ISO 9000

[symbolset]

As a wiser poster than me observed some time ago, that ISO failed to have management processes in place a year in advance of predictable environment changes is evidence they fail even at following their own standards.

That they've let this issue go so long past its natural conclusion - laughing at a proposal to fast-track a 6000 page un-implemented proprietary standard - is evidence they are themselves compromised by agents of an external entity.

If they abort this atrocity all is not yet well. Until they dig out and expel every agent that perverted their mission and monitor for some time that their processes do now work, they will remain suspect.

If they fail to do the right thing, well, they're done. Stick a fork in them. The nations of the world would prefer to return to the bad old days of setting their own standards and negotiating equivalence by treaty. They will not stand for having their standards dictated to them by a US corporation, even through a puppet ISO.

Re:ISO 9000

[cp.tar]

If they fail to do the right thing, well, they're done. Stick a fork in them. The nations of the world would prefer to return to the bad old days of setting their own standards and negotiating equivalence by treaty. They will not stand for having their standards dictated to them by a US corporation, even through a puppet ISO.

Actually, the nations of the world in general will bend over and spread'em for both the US and their corporations with little or no questions asked, and a Thank-you-sir-may-I-have-another-sir afterwards.

Were it not like that, OOXML would not have passed through ISO with so little opposition, i.e. the opposition would not have been quashed so easily.

Living in one of these nations, I cannot begin to tell you how much it saddens me.

Re:ISO 9000

[symbolset]

Living in one of these nations, I cannot begin to tell you how much it saddens me.

Don't despair yet. We're giving this issue the one thing it cannot stand: Light.

Re:ISO 9000

[Herschel Cohen]

RE: "Until they dig out and expel every agent that perverted their mission ... "

I fear the cure may be worse than the disease. Anytime a program like this is put into play, it becomes a game to settle old scores having nothing to do with the supposed issue at hand. That is, too often it is the classic "punish the innocent" while giving the selected guilty another free pass.

It becomes a witch hunt. Believe me I would like to see what was proposed be carried out, but reality intrudes. Like a civil war the wounds fester for ages and the lies propagate until the very types supposedly eliminated are again in charge.

Mod parent up!

[khasim]

Until ISO PUBLICLY admits the SPECIFIC mistakes made AND takes action against the people who committed those mistakes, there is no reason to believe that ISO will do anything differently in the future.

ISO sold out. That's all there is to it.

The geeks vote, they do not run ISO.

[khasim]

As can be seen from this charade, the votes do not matter.

It is who counts the votes that matters.

Microsoft could not buy off all the geeks. So Microsoft bought off the administration staff. Which then allowed a single secretary to get their "standard" on the fast track when it failed every one of their rules for that.

Re:Pardon my ignorance, but...

[totally bogus dude]

Beaten by another, but I wrote a reply so I'm posting it anyway.

The main thing seems to be that lots of government bodies are putting in place (or have already put in place) legislation requiring all government documents use a format that complies to an "open standard". Requiring this for internal documents is less common, but it is common for anything published for public access. The idea being to ensure every citizen is able to access the information the government produces without having to buy products from a specific vendor, for example.

From a technical point of view what ISO does matters not at all. Microsoft are going to continue to develop the format to suit their needs, and any long-term compatibility with whatever ends up being in the "OOXML ISO specification" will be purely coincidental, as they've already stated. Government departments will continue using whatever software they feel like using, and will make a half-hearted attempt to conform to whatever rules they have to, just like they always have.

If .docx and friends get the magic ISO Standard Tick then government departments can simply slap their .docx files on a website and be in compliance with the legislation regarding making their publications publically accessible without vendor bias: it's not their fault that there's only one working implementation of the "standard". Now they could theoretically mount legal action against Microsoft for selling them a product which they claim supports the OOXML ISO standard but doesn't really, but that's unlikely since everybody knows the whole thing is a sham and they're just playing along to cover their asses.

On the other hand, if .docx and friends don't get the magic tick, then the government departments will have to publish their files in something other than {.doc,.docx}. If the chosen format was ODF (.odt etc) then people will need software that can open it. This means a) the government will be pointing people to alternatives to MS Office, and b) Microsoft will "have to" natively support opening .odt files within Office; otherwise they risk losing customers -- particularly the ones that buy Office because that's "what you use to write documents". Also the government departments will need a way to export to the "standard" format, and if Office can't do it natively some may decide to switch software to save that step.

Consider that currently, even if you use OpenOffice or KOffice or Abiword or anything else, you probably send documents to other people using .doc unless you specifically know they don't use Office. The reason is simply that, even if they do use something else, they can probably import the .doc file without problems. However if they do use Office, they're completely unable to import most other document formats.

So, the hoped-for end result is that Microsoft will effectively be forced to make Office interoperate with other software, rather than having everyone else trying to implement Microsoft's format. While the documentation for .docx will no doubt be useful in figuring out some corner cases, it's not a significant improvement over the reverse engineered re-implementations of the format currently being used.

That's the theory, anyway. I doubt it will have an earth-shattering affect either way, but I suppose it's another straw on the camel's back.

Congratulations

[symbolset]

You've just said too much. Now everybody knows who you are.

Any developer who stops learning new languages, tools, techniques, etc. has decided they want to work on legacy apps for the rest of their life.

Whereas people who save their documents in OOXML have decided they want to lose access to them over time (if not immediately). And C# and .NET developers want to write code they'll have to port to next year's Next Big Thing. That's job security there, Maynard. And re-porting the same stuff over and over means you'll never make progress after the first evolution. Congratulations. You've just found a way to get someone to pay you to avoid doing useful work.

Meanwhile, ODF is portable and, well, C. What can you say? If that's not standing the test of time in programming then what is?

Re:Congratulations

[symbolset]

Other than for embedded devices, C is pretty much dead -- and even a lot of that work is in C++ today.

Question for the class: what languages are C++ compilers, Windows and Linux written in? Since we're talking about OOXML and ODF, what language is Microsoft's own ODF to OOXML translator written in? That may be a .cpp file, but the vast majority of that code is C.

You've declued yourself. I'm sorry. Do you want to try again, perhaps on topic this time? You're killing your Karma dude.

The problem is Microsoft

[symbolset]

It was, but it's even more important that people realise the problem is Microsoft, not ISO.

I agree with you in every way. You got the message out - your post is highly moderated and right below mine. I recommend people reading this review what you've said.

When you're going for the first comment you have maybe thirty seconds on slashdot when it's slow. That's not time enough to nuance stuff. You have to strike while the iron is hot and get in the best blow you can. Too much subtlety and it's lost. Too much "blame Microsoft" and it's downmodded too fast for people to see it. I did the best I could.

Yes, ISO is now badly damaged, and that's a tragedy all of it's own, because ISO was a body of great value to the whole world. Now the world needs to be looking at clipping the wings of the predator that did the damage, not at sinking the boot into a crippled ISO.

We need an international standards organization. Do we need this one? I don't know. My opinion will depend on if they fix this, and what processes they put in place to prevent a recurrence. Is my opinion important? Only as much as it is insightful and informative and only to the extent I get my message out, which is why it was important to me to get my comment in first. As others here have noted this is not ISO's first offense - just the most onerous one. This is the telling one. If they will not fix this they are beyond saving. It is not impossible to "fork" ISO.

On slashdot I am fond of saying "this is a tool". Well, standards are tools too. If we don't trust this manufacturer of this class of tool we will need to find one or make one if we are to continue about the business of creating interdependent global stuff.

Re:I value your opinion

[NickFortune]

Now the world needs to be looking at clipping the wings of the predator that did the damage, not at sinking the boot into a crippled ISO.

I love the "crippled ISO" image. It almost suggests that if we just shout at Microsoft and stop saying hurtful things about ISO, why then the organisation will get a chance to heal, and recover its ethical values, and be a force for good in the world once more.

Sadly, I don't think things work like that.

While I agree about Microsoft, I don't think we can really absolve ISO from all blame. To do that would be to send a message to the ISO saying "it's OK to be corrupt. No one minds. Break the rules, stack the deck; they'll just blame the organisation sponsoring the standard. Get your noses in the trough, boys!"

I agree that the fall of ISO is a tragedy. But until and unless they set their house in order I don't see how anyone is going to trust them again. Effectively they've just hung out a shingle saying "For Rent".

At the very least, ISO need to admit that there's a problem here and take steps to both fix the damage done, and to ensure it doesn't happen again. And that's not going to happen if they feedback they get "well, I guess that could have happened to anyone".

Explains what?

[symbolset]

Windows is largely written in C++. Explains a lot, doesn't it?

C++ is derived from C. I've never seen any C++ code that wasn't 90% standard C.

So what have you proven? That Bjarne Stroustrup at Bell Labs in 1979 had 10% to add to C? Where are the Wonders of Microsoft in this equation? On that day Microsoft was still working on a version of DOS that might have subdirectories someday. They knew barely enough about compilers to get their stuff to run.

More importantly, what have they added of value since? Come on. They're the most powerful software company in the world. It's been almost thirty years. They must have contributed something persistent to the pool of common knowledge, eh? Or maybe not.

Re:Pardon my ignorance, but...

[Sique]

Enter MS and OOXML, a document standard that has now been validated by and internationally accepted ISO review procedure. But Morten Kjærsgaard begs to differ:
1.) There is no validated standard right now, for that the final draft had to be published and sent to the members by March 29 2008. This deadline is missed, so the DIS29500 is not official yet and thus cannot be accepted yet.
2.) For a standard to get fast tracked, there has to be an implementation. Because even Microsoft will not support OOXML for at least a year, OOXML couldn't be fast tracked to begin with, and the votes in the different comitees were votes about nil, but not about a fast tracked standard.

Re:Let's hope

[Sique]

I would wager 3.)

They play for time, implement the depreceated ODF 1.1, thus are "standards compliant" and count on the several flaws within ODF 1.1 to taint ODF's stance with gouvernment officials, which in turn will be still using .doc/docx for information interchange. Thus Microsoft gets the time to mend OOXML to agree with their actual document format.