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."

Comments

ISO is dead

[Ariastis]

RIP ISO 2008

Re:MS

[corsec67]

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.

Re:standards are falling

[Shados]

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.

Re:MS

[Narpak]

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.

Re:Cooler heads prevailed

[an.echte.trilingue]

Seems like "Because we hate Microsoft" isn't a compelling enough reason for the ISO.

True, but "unimplementable" should be.

Re:Cooler heads prevailed

[Timosch]

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...

Re:What you can do?

[Adaptux]

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.

Re:standards are falling

[NickFortune]

My point is that "respected" bodies like ISO aren't falling. They've hit the lowest ground years (and in some cases, decades) ago.

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.

The whole idea of "independant standard bodies" is about as flawed as the idea behind software patents.

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.

Re:This is what you complain about?

[Enderandrew]

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.

Re:What you can do?

[Enderandrew]

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.