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ISO Rejects OOXML Protest Appeals
snydeq writes "ISO and IEC gave OOXML the greenlight after organization leaders rejected appeals from four countries to protest the vote that approved OOXML as a standard. According to an ISO press statement, appeals by the national bodies of Brazil, India, South Africa and Venezuela did not garner support from two-thirds of the members of the ISO Technical Management Board and IEC Standardization Management Board, which is required by ISO/IEC rules to keep the appeals process alive."
See NoOOXML, OpenDot, NoOOXML">Boycott Novell and Groklaw for better analysis. People are very angry about this and they should be.
RIP ISO 2008
Correct NoOOXML link. This was one of the first and best of the bunch.
Historically, it always ends in fighting.
Armed revolution.
Foreign takeover.
Collapse into anarchy.
Breed like rabbits, vote against the current leaders, and get labeled undesirable and attacked.
Pick your poison.
The masses are the crack whores of religion.
Some governments are passing laws saying that documents must be stored in a format that is a documented standard.
This is just MS's way of checking that box without actually making their format open.
You are right in that they don't want to open their format, but they need to have the appearance of having one.
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
Nice to see that the price for ISO members was high enough to prevent appeals from going through.
Standards for sale.
Act now before the prices go up.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
Thats how we got into this mess in the first place. Rather than accepting ISO decision to make ODF the international standard. Micrsoft decided everyone already uses office, so we'll use that instead. Microsoft doesn't really give a damn if OOXML passes or not. They just want to be able to say they are standards compliant(easy to do when you define what that standard is). ODF is still a standard as well though, although I don't know what good will come of there being two standards.
So, the ISO needs to allocate a defense budget now. Excellent; let's hope they use Excel to crunch the numbers.
This is only in the spotlight because it matters to anti-MS geeks. International standards have ALWAYS been such a freagin mess. It has always been a fight of power and money. "Fine, we will let you have your feature in the standard, if our technology is part of the standard too, then we'll vote for your proposition, and you vote for our proposition tomorrow".
Its why many are so stupidly hard to implement, are political mess (XHTML2 anyone?), and why corporations eventually feel the need to make their own, to just bypass it all and be done with it.
It was -always- this way. ISO has -always- been a freagin joke, and most people who implemeneted their crap already know this (ISO9001, lol). This is just a whole lot of same old same old.
The damage to the standard has been done. There has been so much negative press swirling around OOXML that ISO approval at this point is largely symbolic and meaningless.
Microsoft shot itself in the foot by trying to bribe national ISO members instead of keeping it on the downlow and improving OOXML to appease those obsessive standard-freaks. But then again, this is Microsoft we're talking about.
I'm not a luddite and would gladly try new things (including Microsoft things), but my perception of OOXML is so low based on all the news stories I've read that I'd rather switch to papyrus than save a document in .docx
AC, your detailed technical analysis has convinced me to never trust Groklaws again. Thank you for such an insightful and objective assertion of opinion as, "unlike most readers, whenever the criticism was of a technical nature, I went to the spec itself and checked. ... those sites often lied about objective matters of fact." Such excellence is par for the course with AC comments. How can I ever thank you for saving me from "ignorance"?
Norway has decided that all official documents must be available through ODF, PDF or HTML; which ever is most suited to the information in question. Also schools and public offices must accept ODF as a valid format. This is because no policy should require citizens to purchase expensive software to use public services. Among other things.
The Long Now Foundation
I know which of those sounds more fun....
I think that the ISO just proved they are just another group of administrative people and have nothing to do with good reliable standards.
ISO/OSI 7 layer model, anyone?
its a paper thing but almost never real running code. CMIP anyone? no? you prefer snmp which actually WORKS and is a real standard?
yes, ISO is a laughing stock. the wars between the IETF guys and the OSI guys were funny to watch some 20 yrs ago. IETF did real stuff and OSI just measurebated (yes, intentional misspelling).
nothing really new here.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Seems like "Because we hate Microsoft" isn't a compelling enough reason for the ISO.
True, but "unimplementable" should be.
weirdest thing I ever saw: scientology advertising on slashdot.
It is not about "We head Microsoft", it is about the fact that something like WordWrapLikeWord95 should not exist in an ISO standard.
...
BTW: There was a very interesting graph in the German magazine c't. The essence was as follows:
XHTML: ~100 pages, ~400 days of standardization process
ODF: ~800 pages, ~900 days
SVG: ~600 pages. ~1050 days
SOAP: ~200 pages, ~950 days
OOXML: ~6500 pages, ~350 days.
You've no idea how incredible that looks in a graph...
What *we* can do when the goverments, corporations and organisations are corrupted and we cant turn to ask help from them, because those who has power, controls those who could help us....?
Despite the name, ISO is not an international organization in the same sense as e.g. WTO or WIPO are international organizations with countries as members. ISO is simply a cartel of national "standardization organizations". Everyone has the right to start an organization to compete with them. I believe that ISO is so strongly committed to acting in the best interest of the dinosaurs that there is no real alternative anymore to doing this. If you agree, please join us at OpenISO.org.
Then maybe it's time we started demanding standards that were truly fit for purpose. That could be the one true thing to come out of this mess. It it raises general in the technical community of how badly broken ISO is, then maybe we're seeing the first steps on the road to a workable standards process.
In any event, there's nothing to be gained by accepting the status quo, and everything to gain from making a fuss. Good standards are important. If ISO can't deliver them we need a standards body that can.
I think you're conflating two ideas there. Firstly, there's the notion of a standard is a technical specification that (I expect and demand) everyone can implement and conform to. Secondly, there's the notion of a sort of government monopoly - in the sense that if YoYoDyne Inc control Standard X and the govt mandates that all frobnitz conform to Standard X, then only YoYoDyne can practically market frobnitz.
The point I think you're missing is that if a standard is a standard in the first sense, then the abuse implicit in the second scenario is impossible. It's not that standards are inherently broken, it's that closed, proprietary standards are broken. And so the problem comes back to IP rather than standards, per se.
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
I guess most of the countries' representatives ond't effectively govern as well as you could. Too bad you can't rule the world and bring us the Utopia in your head :)
Who do you think that these wonderful leaders are? They put their pants on one leg at a time just like you and me. Most of the bureaucrats who prepare these decisions are no more educated than you or I. Governments, even authoritarian ones, are the people.
What's more, I live in a democratic republic, and in such a system, the people must participate or it fails. Questioning government positions is part of what you call a country's "political discourse," which is necessary for the society as a whole to come to a coherent decision that expresses itself in elections.
weirdest thing I ever saw: scientology advertising on slashdot.
Last year I was in a car accident. Someone rear-ended me and totaled my car. The insurance agent called me, and without seeing the car or knowing any facts, said I was 15% liable for being rear-ended. I didn't speed, I stayed in my lane, etc. I called a lawyer who said I was screwed. There wasn't enough money to justify fighting the case in court. The body shop guy said he saw it ever day in my state, that the insurance company wouldn't pay the full claim and just screwed people if the case was small enough to stay out of court. He saw someone parked on the street had their car totaled, and the insurance company said they were partially liable for being parked on the street legally. If the car wasn't on the road, it never would have been hit.
I was furious, so I called my state senator to talk about the partial liability law. We have term limits, so he wasn't up for reelection and wouldn't personally benefit, but he called me back several times to get info. He researched the law, and several cases like mine where we were ripped off. Then he went into legislation and fixed the law.
Sometimes there are a few decent people in office who want to do good. But if you never bring these things to their attention, nothing will ever be done.
Contacting your elected officials may not work, but it beats doing nothing.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Microsoft doesn't really give a damn if OOXML passes or not. They just want to be able to say they are standards compliant
Ironically, they are NOT compliant with the version of OOXML that ISO/IEC approved, which isn't the same as the version of OOXML that ECMA originally handed them. (It's not even clear that the ECMA OOXML spec conformed fully to what Microsoft Office does, but that's a moot point now.)
-- Alastair
Microsoft doesn't really give a damn if OOXML passes or not. They just want to be able to say they are standards compliant
Ironically, they are NOT compliant with the version of OOXML that ISO/IEC approved, which isn't the same as the version of OOXML that ECMA originally handed them. (It's not even clear that the ECMA OOXML spec conformed fully to what Microsoft Office does, but that's a moot point now.)
I'm sure Microsoft are much happier with the idea of tweaking the XML output in a future service pack then they are with having to compete on a level playing field with OpenOffice.
Furthermore, Microsoft said they won't even attempt to get Office 2007 to support it via a Service Pack. Instead, they won't attempt to support that standard until the next version of Office at the earliest, and that could mean at any point in that product's life span.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
I tend to look at it like this...
If nobody speaks up, Microsoft has won. There are a lot of underhanded business practices that MS has "gotten away with" because nobody cared to speak up. If people just let it die off, it opens door for other companies to undermine the standards practices because "people will soon forget."
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
I think what the numbers mean is: the more impossible something is, the less time I want to spend reviewing it. SVG is worth getting right; OOXML is worth nothing.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
They don't even need the appearance.
They just have to match the legal requirements.
It is like the word games redefining torture as not being torture.
It is like defining a rope with a hook as a "braking system".
If the law says torture is illegal, just make sure your actions are legally not torture.
If the law requires a braking system, just make sure a rope with a hook is defined as a braking system.
If the law requires and open standard, just make sure some government or standards body calls it an "open standard". It does not have to actually be open.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Here. 7,525 validation errors. He's the same guy that reported that MSOffice had about 122,000 OOXML errors.
Though I admit that I have some doubts about his methodology for the ODF test.
That is entirely true, which is why Plato argued that people should have superior education. Now, in the modern world, what constitutes superior eduction? Superior to what Plato knew of? Superior to what they have now? Or superior to the standard required to understand the basics of contemporary life, the technologies and societies within it, and the interactions between them? I would argue that that last option should define the minimum standard acceptable for anyone, that better should be encouraged but that since all people have some input to geopolitics, major business decisions, community policies that are likely to have a wider impact, and so on, we should never tolerate a standard of ignorance that perpetuates ignorance and harm.
Arguably, what I'm asking for is not going to be easy or cheap, but if you optimize the quality of the population, you must also optimize their ability to function together, their ability to make good decisions, and their ability to reduce unnecessary damage. At some point, the additional value brought will equal the additional cost to improve standards. That is the "ideal" point, as any more investment is burning money with no benefits and could be put elsewhere for better gain.
A "utopian" society is not a stress-free society by this standard, and there'll still be plenty of bigotry and abuse. Rather, a "utopian" society by this standard is the greatest ability and greatest freedom to choose a different path, with the least possible negative consequences for not being selfish and harmful, because people will have the understanding and tools to make genuine choices, not choices they have copied from someone else without really knowing why, or choices out of fear. To me, "utopia" isn't about perfection, it's about balance. Better understanding with no means of using that understanding isn't more "perfect" than a balance between the two. Nor is superior technology than our ability to understand what it does, why, and whether there are longer-term effects that need to be considered.
Technology should not be held back in fear, nor should understanding. By my definition of "utopia", if one is racing ahead, you should develop the counterpart until it catches up. (As a completely pointless exercise, I came up with six variables you'd need to push hard on, to keep them as close together as possible, to produce the most stable and most enlightened civilization that can be achieved at that time. I believe firmly that allowing any of those six variables to backslide will invariably destabilize society and corrupt understanding, and that all civilizations that have ever declined have done so with that being the core reason, the actual mechanics being a mere secondary effect resulting from this primary cause.)
I believe that the ignorance shown by the ISO board is a direct consequence of that board being unbalanced by my definition. It has poor understanding of the engineering and an even poorer understanding of the social consequences, simply so that it can play with shiny new toys. If there's such a thing as reincarnation, we now know what happens to cats when they die - they become board directors.
I fully accept that there'll be plenty of people who disagree with my notion of "utopia" being a state of optimized relative dynamic equilibrium, where the absolute states are always increasing, and it'd probably be a lot of people's idea of a dystopia, as it is inherently restless and requires active intervention rather than allowing the different markets to independently determine their relative pace. I also agree that a regulated balancing act of this kind may in fact not be achievable in practice, but I've yet to hear any convincing argument as to why not, only the usual stuff about big governments, which doesn't even apply to this.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I never understood this thing about putting your pants (we call them trousers over here) on one leg at a time. You sit on the edge of your bed, fold your legs up, and slide them simultaneously into both trouser legs. It's much easier than doing them sequentially - why would anyone do that?
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
They also don't show the results of going the other way - saving in one of the other apps and opening in the 'reference implementation.' They are not comparing any product's implementation of either spec. If MS Office produced something completely unrelated to OOXML then you would likely get the same results due to reverse-engineering attempts by the other products.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Further, there are mathematical differences between the spec and what Microsoft Office does. Now which do you think an implementor will implement? Your interoperability study is based on reverse engineering, not on following any OOXML specification.
Yet further, there are defects remaining in OOXML that were not addressed and that prevent interoperability. When you try to make a specification in such a short period of time this is to be expected.
-Docvert converts MSWord to OpenDocument, clean HTML
The idiom probably predates the common person owning an elevated bed. I've always assumed that it sprung from the fact that a manservant WOULD put their masters pants on both legs at once while their master was sitting on an elevated bed.
A commoner, having a flat pallet for a bed, would slide one leg of their breeches on and then the other as holding both legs off the ground at once is quite a challenge for most people.
What any of this has to do with ooxml I really have no idea.