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

Re:Just wait

[JoshJ]

I've had this conversation with a couple friends of mine already. I'm not going to waste my time learning how to program C# when it'll be as useful in 3-5 years as Visual Basic is today- nothing more than a tool used to maintain legacy apps.

There's a difference between a language which is truly obsoleted by other competing languages and a language which is designed to go obsolete for the profit of the creating company.

Re:Farewell ISO

[Mongoose Disciple]

I'd consider having to buy an expensive program for a not at all cheap OS just to open a standardized document a real-world consequence. And with a limited budget that is expected to feed my family, for instance, I'd even call it a safety implication.

I have to wonder if you have any idea how ridiculous that sounds: a document that (and we're speculating even here, but I'll give it to you for the moment) can maybe only be opened correctly with Office is equivalent to (for example) certifying a standard for nuclear plant safety that could kill millions of people.

I'm not trying to be inflammatory, but seriously, listen to yourself for a minute.

Re:Farewell ISO

[Kalriath]

I don't think there'd
be nearly the level of outcry if the same were true of OOXML. Yes there would. This is Microsoft, and Slashdot (which for the most part knows nothing about law) and Groklaw (which also doesn't actually know anything about law) are required to hate Microsoft no matter what.