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ISO Puts OOXML On Hold
schliz alerts us that ISO, in response to the four appeals (Venezuela, India, Brazil, South Africa) filed in recent weeks, has put the OOXML standardization process on hold. Here is ISO's press release, which says that ISO/IEC DIS 29500 will not be published for at least "several months" while the appeals process goes forward.
Update: 06/11 10:13 GMT by KD : Reader Alsee points out that the fourth officially recognized appealing country is Venezuela, not Denmark as originally stated. The protests of Denmark and Norway are being disregarded, as they do not come from the administrative heads of their national organizations.
Update: 06/11 10:13 GMT by KD : Reader Alsee points out that the fourth officially recognized appealing country is Venezuela, not Denmark as originally stated. The protests of Denmark and Norway are being disregarded, as they do not come from the administrative heads of their national organizations.
All those countries initially voted no with comments. The comments weren't addressed, and then suddenly the standard was fast-tracked and passed.
The "appeals" will be heard, but I'm not expecting a miracle here.
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Heh, good one! The fast track process was completely inappropriate for OOXML. With 9 months to review 6000 pages the technical community had only scratched the surface of what's broken in OOXML.
No one in the technical community is happy with the quality of OOXML -- even Microsoft can't implement this thing.
ISO wrote:
This statement has no bearing on the similar statements issued by South Africa and Brazil in their formal appeals that they should have received a final text by now. National Bodies should have received a final text but this is quite different to publishing (which is all the ISO are talking about in that final paragraph).
Section 13.12 of the directives reads,
The BRM was in February and the final text was due in late March. It still has not arrived. You might call this evidence of the OOXML text being in an unreleasable state (read: a mess) and South Africa would agree...
Not to mention that the interim draft was not made available as mandated by ISO rules because of the failure of the editor to deliver it. The ISO JTC1 Directives demand the meeting report and the final DIS to be distributed within 1 month of the meeting.
Now Microsoft has a formal excuse for its lazyness to deliver the consolidated text. Blame ISO haha.
The IEEE are just as bad. They charge an arm and a leg for every one of their standards. Just stick the thing up on the web, you cheap bastards.
First sentence of TFA:
Four national standards body members of ISO and IEC - Brazil, India, South Africa and Venezuela - have submitted appeals against the recent approval of ISO/IEC DIS 29500, Information technology - Office Open XML formats, as an ISO/IEC International Standard.
While you have a point, it is important to realize that the documents are generally available for reference at libraries or other public locations. Indeed the town hall (for local law) or state capitol (for State law) should have any standard referenced by applicable law available for public viewing. In the worst case you just request the document via inter-library loan, or view the mandatory deposited copy at the Library of Congress.
I do agree though that this is less than ideal, but it is not quite as bad as your post makes it sound.
Stylish sheet to fix many problems in Slashdot's D3: https://gist.github.com/801524
Please let us get the facts straight here.
Denmark did not protest, appeal, or in any way change its official vote. The official Danish ISO vote is controlled by Dansk Standard, who voted "Yes" in the final OOXML specification vote (after initially voting "No with comments").
The reason Denmark keeps sneaking into the list of countries who "appealed" is probably because a local pro-Open Source lobby organization named "Foreningen for Open Source Leverandører i Danmark" (OSL) (their name in English is "The Danish Open Source Business Association") has submitted a protest and that is by many people mistakenly translated into an "official appeal".
Since the protest is not submitted by Dansk Standard (who holds the official ISO vote) but is in fact from a local lobby organization, the vote can not be considered "official" in any way. And it is important to note in this context, that the official Danish vote is still "Yes".
The protest is available in Danish on the OSL website and I also found a copy of the letter in English on Groklaw (its not on the OSL website for some reason). The original Groklaw artikle on the subject is here, in case you want to read the comments yourself.
The complaint criticises both the way Dansk Standard handled the OOXML approval process and a few formal errors in the ISO process.
The story was first announced by Computer World Denmark (Danish only, sorry). It was first mentioned on slashdot on June 1st where sadly it was also mistakenly described as an "official" protest.
- Jesper
My security clearance is so high I have to kill myself if I remember I have it...
There are four appeals, but Denmark's not one of them -- Venezuela is though.
Denmark are just part of the general howl of protest from people who've looked at the heap of excrement that is DIS 29500 and found it wanting, and/or were in one of the many countries where the behaviour of their National Bodies has made it clear that their local Microsoft lackeys have been interfering with what should be a process focussed on technical merit, not on whether personal gain can be maximised.
Debian: GNU/Linux done the Linux way
The public sector has those concerns too (especially accessibility wrt equality/human-rights), but it's also to do with not favouring one company over another (just like web standards) and OOXML clearly favours one company in that the specification has undisclosed information that can only be explained by Microsoft.
Does that help answer your question?
This is how standards organisations have been financed.
150$ for a standard of socket sizes for light blubs is petty cash compared to cost of facilities needed to produce them.
Standards-(organisations) is still mostly concerned with manufacture of physical goods and their thinking heavily influenced by industrial era (as is most of society, most people have no clue what it means to live in the information age).