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

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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

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Show me one admission that the ISO even realise that this is an abomination of a process. SC34 are overrun with Microsoft zealots like Rick Jelliffe and they blame the world for noticing what a poor job they've done.

They need to admit fault if they want to be trusted again. As of yet there is nothing from the ISO that would inspire confidence.

Re:Farewell ISO

[Insanity Defense]

None of which matters. Businesses don't care what format they use as long as they can pass it back and forth and it just works. That isn't going to change anytime soon.

Businesses care because of what is happening now, with Office 2007 Microsoft is changing the format in a major way. It isn't decided by market forces, its decided by Microsoft, their customers have no say. Why the change? Microsoft gives various reasons, some may even be valid, but the big one is Microsoft wants to force an upgrade to improve their revenue stream. Companies don't like it that they can be forced by their supplier to replace their stock of a product for no reason but to improve the suppliers bottom line. If they can break free to a true standard then no one vendor can control when and if those businesses upgrade.

Businesses and governments have a massive archive of old data in the older DOC formats. Only Microsoft can provide the tools to convert them. This conversion is going to cost those governments and bushinesses a fortune and that expenditure is not dictated by their desires but by Microsoft. They are now beginning to realize that this can happen any time Microsoft wishes to dictate it. Naturally they don't wish to be forced to spend vast quantities of money whenever it is convenient to Microsoft. With a real standard no one company can force such a conversion. No one company will be the sole provider of the tools to do the conversion. No one company can hold your data hostage by their control of the format.

Governments and businesses are slowly coming to understand that right now they no longer control their data, Microsoft does. As that realization sinks in they begin to look for ways to take back control. A true standard helps to take back that control.

Right now in recessionary times when governments and businesses want to conserve money is when Microsoft is seeing a need to force an upgrade and compel those governments and businesses to spend, just when they can least afford to. Also due to the timing of the EU vs Microsoft antitrust cases the eyes of the world are on Microsoft and people are being shown how Microsoft's behaviour is bad for governments and businesses.

Companies that wish to compete for the Office software market have for sometime been educating companies and governments about these issue and slowly they are winning. Self interest is driving those companies to make the educational effort. Self interest is what makes the customers begin to care about standards. Self interest is why Microsoft has to fight so hard to continue their control of the Office market.

No, Denmark has not protested.

[pheede]

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.

Re:No, Denmark has not protested.

[AySz88]

FYI, I think the correct wording is that Denmark hasn't yet appealed formally. The summary is misleading with the whole talk about appeals, but this letter itself doesn't seem to be an appeal.

However, this quote from TFA suggests that Denmark is still intending to appeal:
"'Jacob Holmblad [the recipient of the letter, and ISO Vice President, and managing director of Danish Standard] will appeal directly, because he has one foot in each camp,' explains Morten Kjærsgaard to Computerworld."

ISO 9000

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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.

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.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

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".