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ISO Recommends Denying OOXML Appeals
An anonymous reader passes along word that ISO has responded to the four appeals filed against the approval of OOXML as a standard. To no one's surprise, ISO says that there was nothing wrong with the process. Groklaw's coverage is (as usual) the most comprehensive. Andy Updegrove summarizes ISO's position this way: "1. All judgments made during the course of the process were appropriately made under the applicable Directives. 2. The fact that the BRM voted on all proposed resolutions in some fashion satisfies the requirements of the Directives. 3. The fact that a sufficient percentage of National Bodies (NBs) ultimately voted to approve DIS 29500 ratifies the process and any flaws in that process. 4. Many objections, regardless of their merits, are irrelevant to the appeals process."
How does it matter whether OOXML is an ISO standard or not. No real world implementation exists, so anyone who wants to actually use a standard is still going to have to use ODF.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I can demand that all clown shoes must be measured in cubits and have it made the clown shoe standard. That doesn't mean people will use it.
I think instead of having standards bodies, perhaps we should just say, defacto, that the open source application that manages an open document is in fact the reference implementation. It has all the knowledge in code, for public display and re-use, and that's way better than mere requirements. Like, I'm a total Windows bigot, but I do more C++ on Linux and I now expect that Visual C++ should actually perform the same way that GNU does, rather than vice versa, because I trust GNU more.
This is my sig.
It's quite a silly thing to get all ruffled up about. So what if it's a standard? Yea, it probably should not be, and people probably did get paid off, but the ISO is not a defender of freedom for uber-geeks, they are a standards organization, and overall they do a very good job (compare them to ICANN for instance). Get over it man, it's not a big deal. There are bigger things in life to get miffed about.
Yah, it isn't going to be bad at all whenever we turn to paperless filing for things and the government uses crappy "standards" like this and anyone who doesn't use whatever the "standard" implementation is, can't file something such as taxes.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
...when it has no standard implementation?
What does this say about ISO Standards when their decisions are rejected by the community at-large?
Well, at this point all I can say is fsck ISO. And I think that's the general feeling of many in the IT right now. That's going to have some consequences - like, ISO standards not being worth the paper they're written on, for example.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Before the first time I ever participated in a "standards body", I thought that the committees consisted of really smart technical people gathering together to figure out what was best for the industry at large. How naive!
Then came the rude awakening: The committees are almost entirely comprised of representatives (who often reflect minimal technical expertise in the domain of interest) of the major commercial players in the industry. Each of the reps does whatever he/she can to promote his/her constituent employer's stance on each and every detailed issue, without regard for ethics, and with no regard whatsoever to what is "best" for the industry at large. Buying votes is certainly considered within the pale, in these contexts.
Consequently, the only standards I can respect are the RFCs published by the IETF, for 2 major reasons: