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ISO Relevance Questioned After OOXML Appeals Fail
Cowards Anonymous passes along an Australian PCWorld piece that begins "Countries whose appeals were dismissed regarding the ISO/IEC's approval of Microsoft's OOXML as an international standard are questioning the judgment and relevance of the ISO/IEC and the standards they approve. In a statement made at the Congresso Internacional Sociedade e Governo Electronico (CONSEGI) 2008 conference, representatives from three of the four countries that appealed against an April 1 vote to approve OOXML as a standard said they are 'no longer confident' in the ability of both the International Organization for Standardization and the International Electrotechnical Commission to be vendor-neutral and open when it comes to setting technology standards." Here is the statement signed by South Africa, Brazil, Venezuela, Ecuador, Paraguay, and Cuba. The countries won't pursue further opposition to OOXML.
Maybe it's time to sell it off in a garage sale? I know one company that's already put in a good offer for half the countries.
Is crushing a suspect's child's testicles illegal?
John Yoo: "No, [if] the President thinks he needs to do that."
Really, I really mean this question.
... The Best Standards That Money Can Buy ®
I find an accusation that Brazilians have no life coming from a Slashdot posting Microsoft fanboy so excellently funny that I can only salute you.
These countries should just all start using ANSI. It's a much better organiza--
Wait, you're telling me A doesn't stand for awesome?
It is unacceptable for any organisation to buy a standard that provides it with a competitave advantage.
ISO has produced the OOXML situation and has ridden roughshod over its own rules to do it. So the relevance of ISO is now highly questionable.
ISO can no longer be considered independent for Technology standards.
> "questioning the judgment and relevance of the ISO/IEC and the standards they approve... said they are 'no longer confident' in the ability of..."
Judgment: Bought
Relevance: Irrelevant
Your Confidence in ISO: Of no concern to us now that we have nice fat OOXML consulting paychecks flowing in.
Don't use OOXML. A standard is not a law and ISO/IEC not an enforcement agency. They are an authority which you can judge on its worth.
Since they are arguing that they spent money on using ODF then why care about OOXML?
deal with it, it isnt the end of the world.
It is if you are the unfortunate bastard who has to figure out how to read in a Mickeysoft Word doc and convert it to another format! What do you do when a section is tagged as "Format like Word 95"?!
metzomagic
granted ISO isn't handling these appeals and this scenario the way they should (imho), questioning their validity as a standards organization is probably the best thing for monopolies like Microsoft.
At this point even if OOXML gets turned down as a standard and enough countries (especially the big players like europe and the US) scoff at the ISO then Microsoft has turned us against our standards ideal and won.
Without even pointing a finger, MS will have stripped the ISO of legitimate credibility as a standards institute. Not a good thing.
Standards can be wrong or incomplete but they are still completely vital to the proper functioning of modern computing.
If Microsoft's dodgy dealings have managed to invalidate trust in one of the main standards bodies, thereby making less people adhere to standards, this will be a serious blow to interoperable computing in the future.
yes Microsoft submitted a document format
BUT they didn't let it go (still have clauses to keep their finger innit) AND have non-documented "features" like DoLikeWord97
an ISO standard HAS to be FULLY open, FULLY documented and FULLY in the hands of ISO
the MS submission is none of them
Also there is no application in the wild that would actually save/load an ISO-MSOXML file, MS have even stated they don't plan to support it
On technical matters lies and corruption do not work. These countries show they bother about technical standards being built on rational and consensual decisions, not being bought just for helping Microsoft control document formats.
These countries appear closer to integrity than Western wealthy countries, interesting.
Part of the advantage MS gets from this is that they can now sell their software to organizations that require open document format specs. So even if you don't want to use OOXML, you local government might (and likely will - it's not like they'll stop buying office licenses, particularly if they can get around the open format law in this way).
Of course, I've you've ever seen an ISO-9001:2000 certified process, you probably already know how completely meaningless the specs and certifications are in practical terms.
It's sad that non of the countries tries to take the appeal on the next level, the Secretaries-General, because it would show us how high the corruption in ISO goes.
While I do not doubt that ISO will be around for a long while yet; the case of ODF and OOXML illustrates how their significance isn't all that it used to be. The case of ODF shows that even if a big corporation gets their own standards passed by unethical means people will still choose the superior product. At least so it would seem so far. More and more companies and nations are making ODF a document standard because it is Open and available to all their citizens. Why pay for expensive software when free software does the job more than adequately.
What annoys me the most about cases such as this is the fact that they get little to no coverage in my nations media. No mention in any newspaper at all. Then again it's no big surprise since the "newspapers" are looking more like tabloids every day.
The Long Now Foundation
It's more than that. Microsoft pushed countries that otherwise would have had no interest in the process to sign on as voting members. They also stuffed country committee meetings with their own people and in one case got caught paying people to attend.
It was so bad that the working group responsible is now paralyzed because too many of the new countries who signed on as voting members can't even be bothered to vote on anything that's not OOXML.
This is not just a disagreeable decision. It's an abuse of process.
you obviously didn't read the letters sent to/from iso...
and you haven't followed much the whole process...
groklaw has some pretty good docuntation on it.
it is not about being rancid. it's about being open(the standard really isn't) and not forcing other counteries vote.
You miss the main point. The "standard" is incomplete and cannot be implemented without access to source code within Microsoft's office suite. On this basis alone, it should have been rejected until the documentation is complete. I wonder why you defend them so much when it's obvious this "standard" is utter shit and totally unusable?
640x480 pixels, blue background, no window decorations, and 80 columns wide big white characters?
Or worse, we have too many with lots of competing standards (like ODF vs. OOXML).
While we still have some competing standards, there are many fewer than there would be if we had several standards bodies
...and that's the way the cookie crumbles.
Fuck off. Free Software for the WIN!
Open Source, whatever, libre beats Apple shit, and Microsoft too.
I want my sources available to modify if needs be, and considering I still cannot take Mac OS and modify it and distribute it legally sucks.
I want you to suck my pussy you damn cock muncher. Come on! I know you think that cocks are clean and so on, but pussy is nicer! Now kiss it!
Freak.
These countries appear closer to integrity than Western wealthy countries, interesting.
Because these countries have nothing to gain from supporting the entrenched suppliers, thus they are able to view the situation more objectively.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
ISO did not have to go along with MS's scam. ISO could have done the right thing. MS did not hurt ISO, ISO did it to themselves.
You are an ignorant asshole. The fact that upset people is not that OOXML have been approved. The fact is that what have been approved should NEVER EVER been allowed to go through the fast track process.
ISO failed massively there.
I thought "Format like Word 95" meant to format like internet 95 - red flashing text with lots of exclamation points or asterisks near it. Oh yeah, and with a loud color behind it and also a background bitmap to provide some contour.
I think as long as the user can't easily read it without eyestrain it will suffice for "Format like Word 95".
It is good that they are doing this, but it will have no effect in this specific case. No matter what anyone says, these guys speaking out does in fact damage the ISO's credibility. Considering the situation, it will effect the ISO at some point. Of course in the eyes of Microsoft the damage doesn't matter because each battle if fought one and a time and their is always going to be casualties. The ISO isn't part of Microsoft so however they suffer, won't matter one bit to them.
I'd think it's quite obvious this is not about ISO approving a standard some of us don't like; it's about how this standard was approved.
ISO has demonstrated that anyone can get anything approved, if they are willing to spend a whole lot of money in the process.
An organization like ISO should at the very least appear to be objective. Instead, the sold out, it's as simple as that.
The fact that OOXML was approved, and the process leading up to that verdict, proves two things: 1) Microsoft is a scummy as it has always been, if not worse, and 2) ISO is corrupt to it's core, and can no longer be trusted to be fair about anything, period.
No, that's exactly the problem, we now have a standard that we can't work from. It's completely unusable and shouldn't have been accepted as a standard.
As a matter of fact, what will become the ISO/IEC standard on OOXML is not likely to be truly implemented by anyone. Microsoft has already announced that they will not anytime soon implement the changes relative to the OOXML format that they're currently using.
Just be glad we have a standard that we can work from
Why would anyone want to "work from" the ISO/IEC version of the OOXML specification?
Governments will want msft anyway, because msft will bribe them. So the ISO approval of OOXML gives the governments a good excuse. If goverments want msft "standards" then msft wins. What we think about ISO does not mean a damn thing.
The fact that, of all things people might not like, OOXML became a standard is not the sore point.
The way it happened (if we can believe the reports about microsoft strawmen buying themselves in last-minute etc.) means a flawed proposition can always be declared a standard, if the supporter trows enough cash at it.
I do not implie that OOXML was a flawed proposition, I just say the way OOXML got approved, you can approve about anything.
fuck you, we don't need microsoft apologists, microsoft clearly stacked the vote paying for votes and corrupted the entire ISO process and i hope it comes back to bite both microsoft and the ISO standard on the ass...
Groklaw has more on this.
you had me at #!
This really sums up the ISO standards process...
Most countries could not be bothered to object initially
Only a few appealed
Now the few remaining have given up
Why - because it was steamrollered through as everyone thought it would be, the next time Microsoft want a standard I suspect no-one will object because they will see no point
Puteulanus fenestra mortis
The basic problem is this:
- I know about OOXML, simply because people took notice on this occasion. The methods used to pass this standard are, what most people would call, corrupt.
- I don't know much about the other standards that ISO pass each year, and I doubt many people take much of an interest.
- given that ISO apparently have no problem with the way OOXML was published, we can assume that the horrendously/obviously screwed up process is 'fine/standard'?
In short, ISO's leadership has 'standardized' a method of simply bypassing the relevant processes, buying/pressuring the right people and getting something published without any real chance to stop it.
Maybe propose a new standard for ISO - 'Method for getting an ISO stamp on a donkey'. I guess since it would be based on ooxml, it's already got one foot in the door?
That's how politics come to a close about an issue. Those who lost complain, publicly, loudly, and with no effect whatsoever on the process itself. Then everyone goes back to business.
You can love it or hate it, but if you watch enough politics closely enough, you see this pattern repeat over and over and over again.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
I'm sorry, but I believe you have spectacularly missed the point of the complaints here. There are basically two separate issues that have upset people.
The first is that we don't have a standard we can work from. Have you looked at the OOXML documentation at all? It isn't just big, it's pretty much ill-defined. What's the point of an ill-defined standard? If you want backward compatibility, it should say that certain features must work as documenting in another standard that you cite. OOXML says they must work like various previous bits of software with unspecified behaviour.
The second is that despite these glaring technical flaws, the standard has been approved because Microsoft have basically paid for enough people to join formerly opposed national standards bodies to swing the votes. This demonstrates that a single group with enough financial power can subvert the mechanisms for independent peer review that groups like ISO are expected to follow.
It is hardly surprising that in the final tally of national standards bodies, most approved OOXML. The point is that many of those did not approve it until the last minute, when numerous companies with an obvious affiliation to Microsoft suddenly started sending representatives along just in time to get voting rights, and then voted the standard through, with no evidence that they had even read it. There is considerable opposition to OOXML in most of these places, particularly from those who have actually read the material, but they have been shouted down by money and procedural flaws. That just means the affected national standards bodies also need to revise their processes or become irrelevant.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Standards are great, but who says you have to implement them?
Look at Internet Explorer and the w3 standards as a case.
If Microsoft don't add the competing OPEN format to Office, they will p-off lots of businesses and governments who went open source but still have departments using Microsoft products.
Take Nobody's Word For It.
You guys should read the book "A century of war" from William Engdahl. You'll see how the countries that tried to appeal the standard ISO acceptance are the very ones trying to resist the imperial anglo american order.
Andy Updegrove does, too. As usual, he's a bit more level-headed and insightful than PJ.
Knowledge is the small part of ignorance that we arrange and classify. (Ambrose Bierce)
How the fsck is this insightful?! Someone must not been following the news about how Microsoft stacked all the committees and had basic outright fraud in pushing the national votes through.
You managed to not only mess up another standard this time, you took down an international standards organization with you.
This one must be a record.
Its their bed that they have made and now they have to lay in it.
Its sad to see the reputation destroyed for so little.
It does shed light on the Big Star/Cheap Hooker situations that crop up. Not thinking with the big head.
There is still the outstanding EU checks continuing. That and the fact there is still a path for the ISO appeals process to continue means this is not over yet. Considering ISO polices itself and does a pretty awful job, I suspect that the EU is going to be the best chance of putting this terrible 'standard' to sleep.
We have nothing to gain from funneling money into Microsoft's coffers.
But here are a few facts:
1. Sarkozy is best buds with the head of MS France
2. At the national std org (AFNOR) meeting, there was an overwhelming consensus towards voting "no"
3. The day before the final ISO vote, someone at the office of the president called our rep to the ISO
4. Our vote switched to "abstain", magically. This allowed OOXML to pass.
Corruption. There is no other word for it. It's interesting that Venezuela, Brasil, and Cuba voted, basically, against corruption. That should tell you something about what kind of "truth" we're being fed about those countries. (And no, hold your strawmen, I'm not implying that Castro is an angel.)
We asked for explanations about this vote; I don't think they even bothered to respond.
Yes that's often the pattern, but not always, especially in the computer field. Sometimes, a seemingly minor issue is the excuse for radical change. Often the only variable is the timing.
That's how X.org started from XFree86 and XFree86 died -- it would have succeeded in 1990 not 2001.
That's how IBM lost it's PC leadership (trying to force Micro Channel as "The patented successor to ISA") -- it would have succeeded in 1985 but not 1990.
That might be happening with Vista too if Microsoft isn't careful -- it would have succeeded in 2000 possibly not 2006 (time will tell).
I suspect it might be too early for ISO be be junked, but it might be the excuse the highly populated countries of the world (India+Brazil make up a large percentage of the world population) to create their own ISO...especially if they can get China on board. Each of these countries are extremely nationalistic, so they are just looking for a big enough excuse with enough momentum to go their own way. If OOXML is that excuse, that separatist ISO might have preferential treatment in many countries that are trying to escape American and Euro-centric standards.
easy - use VFAT. Not the intended behavior, but you're going for compatibility, right?
It also seems to me that we have a classic north/south western vs. non-western corporation dominated vs. socialist split occurring here. It's in the best interests of these interests of these countries to join forces to protect each other.
And while their at it form their own version of the IMF/World Bank/WTO as those organizations seem to screw over smaller nations so consistently. Punch out of the current system and start their own.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
That's how politics come to a close about an issue. Those who lost complain, publicly, loudly, and with no effect whatsoever on the process itself. Then everyone goes back to business.
You can love it or hate it, but if you watch enough politics closely enough, you see this pattern repeat over and over and over again.
There's a difference here though: In most political contexts, nonviolently establishing an alternative process is prohibitively difficult.
In this context, it's still difficult, but much easier. ISO is not an intergovernmental organization. It's just simply a private-sector organization with seat in Geneva. Nothing and nobody has the right stop us from setting up a competing organization.
The key challenge is in convincing governments that the new organization is more worthy of paying attention to than ISO/IEC JTC1. In this context it's very good news that some governments are expressing doubts about ISO/IEC.
Note that since nations are sovereign, it is not necessary for an organization that aims to become a better alternative to ISO/IEC to convince a majority of countries. Even convincing a handful of countries is probably enough if a heavyweight like e.g. Brazil or India is among them, since that would suffice for putting very strong pressure on e.g. Microsoft to allow true interoperability.
They won't understand.
A lot of people act as if ISO was
A) some kind of guarantee that it'll be implemented 100% accurately and compatibly by everyone, and there is absolutely no room for wiggling in incompatible details, and
B) it's the first time this happens.
Hello? Both are false.
As a trivial example, C is an ISO standard. ISO/IEC 9899, to be precise. When was the last one you saw two C compiler implementations, from two different vendors and preferrably on different architectures, that were 100% compatible with each other or the standard? It's trivial to produce code that produces wildly different results, and offten incorrect results, based on unspecified details like endianness or word size.
Or take paper sizes. The ISO 216 defines paper sizes like A4, and multiples. Has that stopped anyone from selling "letter" sized paper instead? Or it's trivial to produce paper which is technically A4, but will jam your printer anyway, e.g., because it's much thicker than normal and the standard says nothing about that third dimension.
Most of the ISO standards are just guidelines, nothing more.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Alright, OOXML has been ratified an official standard by the ISO organization. But what does that mean? Just because ISO has made OOXML a standard doesn't mean somebody is putting a gun to someone's head forcing them to use it. All of the good standards have been discovered over time, by the trial of time. If people do not use OOXML, then the fact that it is a standard would be moot.
Everybody knows that they voted this trash that they call a "standard", because Microsoft bought them.
And everybody knows that they are doing this for the same reason.
It does not even matter if it is Microsoft.
This is the behavior of someone who has no soul and would sell his mother for a dollar.
When you try to destroy openness and someone blocks you, you fail.
When you then scream that the others want to destroy openness, that's an epic fail.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Of all the countries participating in ISO/OOXML standardization isn't it pretty amazing that South Africa, Brazil, Venezuela, Ecuador, Paraguay, and Cuba are the ones that Microsoft can't buy...
I mean you'd expect western countries to have a certain level of integrity... Whereas less wealthy countries usually would be easier to bribe, but I guess not...
Okay, you can discuss whether or not the different countries/TC's was bribed, but dirty tricks were played!
If a country's view of things is so distorted by business interests (think monetary) that it loses its ability to see and think clearly about ethical issues then that country hopelessly corrupt and has no real future. And that includes the US.
BTW, I've always been a patriotic American. The Star Spangled Banner still gives me goose bumps. But, seeing the corruption so blatantly displayed as it was in the OOXML debacle. That NB's are so corrupted as to allow this and then not have it become a major issue in the press tells me the US is very close to its demise.
The greatest nation ever is self-destructing.
That means the ISO/IEC is as honest and useful as the UN.
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
Standards bodies have always had a mixed record.
In some cases (e.g. early ANSI C), they did a reasonable job bringing together practitioners and standardizing and documenting a mature technology.
In other cases (e.g., ALGOL 68, MPEG-7), they brought together a bunch of academics who thought they could use the standards body to realize their untested and unrealistic ideas.
Neither of those cases is relevant anymore; people can communicate and build consensus over the Internet.
Where standards bodies still matter is in a legal sense: a standards body can guarantee that a "promise not to sue" actually has some legal force behind it, in the form of a binding agreement between the standards body and the vendor participants.
Of course, that requires a standards body that actually takes this aspect of standardization seriously and doesn't make exceptions. ECMA dropped the ball on this.
Think about it for a sec. How did western "rich" countries become "rich"?
yeah, you got it now...
Again, what else is new?
Especially in regards to the ISO 9000 series, especially as applied to software companies/departments who want that rubber stamp, you could be 100% compliant even if you work towards the wrong goals and achieve the wrong results. Essentially anyone with the money to blow on a byzantine bureaucracy where you have to document every bleeding obvious step, and document compliance with some brain dead rule, can get that certification. No need to even pay those money to ISO. You'll lose them the old fashioned way.
E.g., I know at least one company where they institutionalized the worst imaginable caricature of the waterfall model. And I don't mean the sane waterfall model, but the distorted caricature that sometimes is used under that name. In fact, a distorted caricature of even that. Everything must start with writing a cubic metre of use-cases and collect the signatures of a few dozen people on it. (Note that their model doesn't include at this step any kind of mockup or proof of concept to show them. You must just have faith that if you nag them enough they'll tell you _all_ their requirements in detail, and you'll write them down.) Then you work for some months on the implementation. _Then_ you have a couple of months for tests and fixing at the end. Then the customer finally sees anything, and _of_ _course_ it'll be exactly what he had in mind. And if more needs to be done, loop from the start now.
It's counter-productive, but if you could be arsed to document how you adhered to every step of it religiously, and can answer with a straight face things like, basically, "did you do what the rules said you should be doing?" you could be ISO 9000 certified for that crap process.
E.g., I had the mis-fortune of working with someone who wanted to have documented quality targets in advance, as per ISO 9001. Sounds good. Except he wanted to measure the entirely wrong things. He had only one tool he knew how to use, that is, a tool for benchmarking web applications. We, however, had made a framework. So instead of figuring out how he can benchmark the actual calls to the framework methods and classes, he wanted to benchmark the HTTPUnit unit tests. So basically he could write there as a quality goal, stuff like "the unit tests for the SomeComplexEJB module finish in less than 5 seconds." Woe if two iterations later, and having included test cases for any bugs reported and fixed, you end up taking more than 5 seconds.
Yep, if you're stupid enough, you can get _that_ sanctified as compliance with ISO 9001.
It doesn't say you should be doing the right thing or the effective thing. It just says you must have a type of process and can produce the relevant documentation if audited.
I'd say that bribing ISO to get that rubber stamp, might actually be an improvement in some places, compared to actually complying with a bad process thought up by a non-techie. At least if you bribe ISO, hey, at least you don't ruin everyone's productivity too. And the losses are basically limited to that bribe, which limit you don't get if you actually comply.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Currently, we see only a few countries pursuing reassessment. However, as competition continues others may find national solutions better than a consensus approach. Unfortunately, the US has squandered its moral persuasion, necessary to achieve truly universal standards and negotiated settlements of disputed issues. We appear to be witnessing the dissolution of the promise of ISO. Some in ISO may have won a tactical victory for their support for Microsoft, but may as a result wind up loosing the vision of reaching standardization on far more fundamental issues.
While I agree with the comments criticizing the standards, I'm a little surprised not to see anyone commenting on the make-up of the list of the countries who published the statement.
Of the countries on the list (South Africa, Brazil, Venezuela, Ecuador, Paraguay, and Cuba), three (Venezuela, Cuba, and, lately, Ecuador) are countries whose foreign policy is centered around opposition to the U.S. In this case they happen to be on the right side of the issue, but I think that the people commenting on how these countries position is admirable should consider that maybe, just maybe, their position has more to do with politics than technology? That they need to be seen as being in opposition to a U.S. entity?
If the standard were actually good, but Microsoft (or some other U.S. company) stood to benefit, I think it is likely that those three countries would again be protesting, no?
Sigh. My id isn't prime. 2 2 2 2 2 3 5 313
Not sure what your point is.
China is definitely more repressive than Cuba. Yet they don't suffer any kind of embargo.
for once in my existence I'm proud to be Brazilian
half a litre is silly. HALF???
A full litre is too much.
A Pint is about right for a grown up.
when it comes to humans, stones are a better fit for our weight than kilos. Hell, we might as well use pounds if we're to use kilos.
You don't HAVE to be 100% compliant to be free of patent threat when using the standard.
Borland weren't going to be sued by whoever "owned" patents in the standard because there weren't patents in there and even if there were, the grant of license would not have been "only if you do ALL of it".
But if you want to make a braille reader, you still have to implement graphics parts of MSOOXML or you are technically in breach of license for MS's patents on MSOOXML. You can't DISPLAY graphs. Or movies. Etc., but you MUST implement them.
The greatest nation ever is self-destructing.
They always do, as there is a logic to that. First, some random country (Rome, Britain, US, etcetera) gets a bump in economic productivity (for any reason). That leads to (i) a growing list of interests in far-reaching places, and (ii) a growing military force to support those interests. Then the military force becomes so gangantually massive that it brings down the whole economy, and other nations can play catch up.
I AM NOT TALKING ABOUT AMERICA. Think of the British, or other empires, before modding me down.
Or better yet, read the book.
Each of those countries has different interests and viewpoints. Some (cuba, venezuela) are left (leaning to extremism). Brazil, on the other hand, has a large Linux community, and all top CS departments in here have people working on FOSS.
With MS's billions and attack lawyers, people have been told they are breaking MS's patents and given up before it gets to court.
Conveniently this means you can tell people that MS haven't sued people for patent infringement and STILL be telling the truth.
They've THREATENED patent suit plenty, though.
...I am not very comfortable to see Brazil rubbing elbows with crazy Chavez in Venezuela or Castro's Cuba. It reminds me there are political besides technical reasons why some countries support FOSS. For many years I was very close to the FOSS movement in Brazil and I can say "not sending more $$ to the USA" was as good a reason as any to support FOSS in certain circles.
All that aside though, not too long ago I was talking to someone who makes a lot of money selling knowledge (in the format of software tools) to various Brazilian agencies both in the federal and local levels. I knew there is a law in Brazil that compels government agencies to prefer Open Source solutions over proprietary unless they can prove they could not find a viable FOSS alternative.
What I didn't know was that when asked "do you want this for Windows or for Linux" the answer from some agencies would be "please don't ask that question. We want the Windows version but if you tell us there is a Linux version we'll be forced to buy that. Let's pretend you didn't say anything."
In that environment being able to require an ISO standard is a tremendous tool to help level the playing field. If ISO had not approved OOXML those agencies in Brazil would have _no legal basis_ to prefer MS Office. By becoming a standard, OOXML now tilts the field back in MS's favor. MS knows this. That's why they did and will do absolutely anything to be able to let their reps and techs say "yeah, ours is an ISO standard too..."
Boo Hoo a major US company got a standard approved. Get over it.
Microsoft started to attack and undermine the people in the committees. A lengthy blog post by one of the people in the committees http://deepakphatak.blogspot.com/2008/05/this-is.html
My guess is that companies don't want security. They want security labels.
I think you're right.
They want to show that yes, they passed some audit, so they're secure and may deal with financial transactions or other "high security required" crap. Whether they really are secure or not, who cares?
Only their insurance companies, who ultimately absorb all losses, have reason to care. So the question becomes, "Why doesn't the insurance industry care?" Evidence (crappy standards & porous security on the system comprising 90% of the network, for starters) suggests that the relevant demand curve is such that the perceived level of risk (which equals the incentive to buy insurance) minus the total actual losses claimed, is currently at or near its maximum, with the result that insurance companies, the nominal cost-bearers, are not motivated to demand standards with any more technological legitimacy than the so-called "OOXML Standard." But if the demand curve is as I hypothesize, they are not truly "cost-bearers" in any meaningful sense. The "cost" of business losses to all computer crimes are subtracted from all insurance payments to determine the profit margins that insurance companies realize from IT, but obviously when zero insurance payments are made, the demand for insurance itself completely, and pay-in minus pay-out equals zero. Since some risk is required to make insurance desirable, the inflated cost of doing business is also a side effect that does not motivate anybody within the insurance industry, nor at the tops of the corporations which are their biggest customers, to want technologically valid standards in IT, or at least not better ones than these, which are known in the trade to be crap. In fact, lax security tends to encourage embezzlement by making it both profitable, and of limited interest to the parties directly involved. Only the customer suffers, and only in increased cost of doing business, and in the barriers to enter new markets that result in the totally immeasurable reduction of consumer choices, in comparison to a theoretical ideal. Speculation aside, the large amount of capital required to enter the insurance racket effectively precludes all newcomers from it, therefore free market competition is theoretically impossible, and any present deviations from free market ideals can be expected to remain in perpetuity.
The good news is that business losses are not insurable! According to Austrian economic theory, they are a matter of personal responsibility, conceptually identical to getting out of bed in the morning to work for a wage.
Hoppe:
...
An uninsurable risk is one where the following condition holds: If I know with regard to a particular risk some or all of the factors that determine its outcome, then such a thing is no longer accidental; its likelihood can be individually affected, and therefore cannot possibly be insured. Or, to formulate it somewhat differently, everything that is within either full or partial control of an individual actor cannot be insured -- cannot be risk-pooled -- but falls within the realm of personal or individual responsibility.
Take an example where we have at least partial control. Can I insure myself against the risk of making business losses? Obviously not. While I have no direct control over the actions of the buyers and non-buyers of my products (those who do directly determine my profits and losses) I do have some control over my business's success or failure. I have control over my production costs, as well as the kind and quality and price of the product I produce. In fact, I can make losses deliberately if I want to. It would be impossible for me to pool my risk with other business people, as if losses were something like being struck by lightening.
Now with this distinction between accidental events, which are insurable, and events that are uninsurabl
"I can't imagine how things could get any worse!" (some guy) "That could just be failure of imaginatioÂn on your p
Perhaps what is needed is to lobby for a change to ISO/IEC standards procedure. Specifically to enforce that there can only be one current standard for a specific area (in this case XML based document format). Any pre-existing standard is deprecated and will be unendorsed as a standard in a fixed period (less than 5 years). The "specific areas" would also be subject to review (to prevent spurious categories enterring the system).
Currently standards are a joke "as there are so many to chose from". Enforcing a single endorsed standard would rectify that and ensure that
a) Being a standard means something, and
b) Players are seriously interested in ensuring that they become and remain the standard (forcing interoperability compromises to maintain that)
My $0.02 worth,
Ken R.
Well, It's because we (Venezuelans) actually protested at Fondonorma (standarization body in venezuela).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/League_of_Nations
ISO did not have to go along with MS's scam. ISO could have done the right thing. MS did not hurt ISO, ISO did it to themselves.
True, though Microsoft did have the brilliant idea of sabotaging the preeminent open standards organization and getting itself big government contracts all with a handful of payoffs. That's some evil judo they've got there.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
All I know is, most of the Brazilian girls I've ever encountered were seriously hot.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
What do you do when a section is tagged as "Format like Word 95"?!
... hardly a "standard" worth bothering with. Now, ultimately, here's what's going to happen with OOXML. Okay, so Microsoft managed to get their format declared an official ISO standard. That's fine and dandy, has great marketing potential in the near-term (which is all Microsoft cares about) but ultimately, it's going to be a foot-in-self-shoot situation. When it turns out that nobody can effectively implement this standard, it's going to die.
Pull out that old WIndows 95 laptop, scrounge around for a copy of some old version of Office, see what happens, and implement it that way.
Yeah, I know
Hell, I'd say that the Open Office folks have done a better job reverse-engineering the old Microsoft formats than anyone will ever be able to do with OOXML. The real tragedy of this whole affair is that Microsoft managed to corrupt a major standards outfit: I'd say that other such bodies bear watching. It worked once, and it wouldn't surprise me one bit if Microsoft tries it again.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
'nuff said.
It's easy to blame Microsoft or the ISO for the host of things that could be perceived to be wrong here. Recall that in the course of voting in favour of this or any specification, each voting country or organization *represents in good faith* that this proposed standard will enhance their ability to interoperate in some way.
If we assume that Microsoft did not buy *every* affirmative indication of support through money or lobbying (and it has not been alleged or demonstrated that that is the case), there remains the potentially annoying facts: that at least one voting member legitimately wants OOXML as one of their standards for electronic editable rich document interoperability; and that some of these voting national standards bodies may not be fulfilling their mandate to meet the best needs of the technical and industrial stakeholders they represent.
I will repeat what I've previously stated for emphasis: Nothing has changed here in the nature of the ISO.
To the extent that the ISO may have appeared virtuous by the actions of its members in the past, it may now appear to be vicious by the actions of its present members. The responsibility for any poor decision-making should rest squarely on the members, which requires the fairly obvious, but posturing-deficient solution of fixing national corruption.
At a more abstract level, I'm not convinced that I want a technical standards body to make moral determinations of goodness or badness of an idea for standardizing something beyond the judgment that on the balance of probabilities, a particular proposal is or is not technically sound for implementation and potentially useful. If a sufficiently large mass of technically adept professionals will not or cannot compel a superior standard, they: are not presenting a superior standard; unwilling to sacrifice career and dollars for the sake of the superior standard (same position as anyone accused of corruption with OOXML); or they are poor at lobbying or communicating (not a fault of the ISO, Microsoft, or really anyone else).
By this, I make my peace with this matter, and will not stop anyone who feels the need to continue to carelessly assume things about standards to do so at their own expense.
There are 1.1... kinds of people.
The same way rich people become rich?
Let's have the International Court deal with things like war criminals and other issues affecting all of humanity at the basic human rights level, instead of petty bickering among geeks who didn't get their way about the format of some bits.
As for a direct attack to the Slashdot community, apparently your conception of that community does not include people who work with standards on a daily basis who've known for a while about this decline in the quality of ISO output.
The ISO has always been the pawn of big metal IT, the telcos and anyone who was willing to pay them to participate in their standards process.
An example of the ridiculousness of ISO standards is the old X400 e-mail 'standard'. Long story short: the ISO approved multiple incompatible variants of X400 that required expensive and proprietary Gateway translation to be compatible across systems. There were IBM, CDC, and other variants that simply couldn't connect with each other without intervening translation ... and in the final analysis what is e-mail, but a transport medium for imparting information across systems.
Compare X400 to SMTP (which isn't controlled by the ISO) and you'll see what I mean.
The ISO got caught on the hop by packet switching and the Net, and since then has been trying to muscle in on the new network and establish a new raison d'etre at the expense of the bodies (IETF, the old IANA, ICANN etc) that have managed standards so well that the Net does hold together and isn't fragmented the way its old clients (big metal mainframe producers, hard switched telecommunications providers) never managed to achieve.
That said, with OOXML I don't really give a damn (hey, MS can pay the ISO for as many competing standards as it likes in data formats and it won't make any difference to me) but as a general principle the ISO shouldn't be allowed to promote any standard that competes with already accepted standards. I mean, what's the point of standards if they don't promote interconnectivity and efficiency in communication. (Multiple 'standards' for the same purpose just fragment the world.)
Regards,
I'll lay you ten to one that in the case of Venezuela, Chavez simply wanted another means to piss off the corporation-friendly Republican Party.
"We are Microsoft. You shall be assimilated. Competition is futile."
representatives from three of the four countries that appealed against an April 1 vote to approve OOXML as a standard said they are 'no longer confident' in the ability of both the International Organization for Standardization and the International Electrotechnical Commission to be vendor-neutral and open when it comes to setting technology standards."
I'm not confident of that either, given that ISO rubberstamped ODF 1.0 with its tons of flaws and then put Microsoft through hell to ratify a much more polished and feature-complete spec (and people are still whining about it). IBM tried to use the ISO for its own ends, and was defeated (thank God). End of story.
This isn't about Microsoft. I don't think this episode does them any credit, but we're discussing ISO. ISO are easy to blame. Not necessarily for letting Microsoft stack the deck, (although they could have co-operated a little less enthusiastically) but for not following their own written procedures and for ramrodding through a standard that plainly was not ready for the fast track process, for doing so over the protests and complaints of many member countries, and for not even giving a hearing to the protests raised after the fact.
It simply isn't good enough. Sorry.
You keep saying that as if it lets ISO off the hook, but I really don't see your point. Yes, you're probably right and ISO have probably been permitting this sort of chicanery for years on end. One criticism of ISO I keep seeing in the wake this debacle is for their apparent inability to adapt to the needs of the technical community in a changing world. The sort of gamesmanship that mattered little when fixing the diameter of a bolt can seriously undermine the process when applied to something as complex as a multi-document file format. If ISO wish to remain relevant they need to realise this.
But really it matters little whether ISO have lapsed from once lofty standards, or if they have always been corrupt, with this issue but showing them in their true light to thousands of people who previously lived in happy ignorance.
What is important is that ISO need to raise their game if they are to continue to be taken seriously as a world standards body.
Many of whose issues were not discussed at all due to the inadequate time allocated for the discussion. Perhaps that's their fault as well? And the refusal of ISO to consider any appeal for these issues? Is that too the fault of member bodies? I'm sorry, but no. That doesn't seem at all reasonable.
I'm not sure I want ISO making moral judgements either. But this isn't a question of morality. It's a matter of a standard that quite clearly fell far short of the required level of consensus being forced through by a standards body quite happy to bend, break or re-write its own rules purely in order to favour one party over all the other participants.
This is not, I feel, behaviour we want to encourage. Not because of the ethics of the matter, questionable as they undoubtedly are, but because it leaves the distinct impression that ISO's standards are for sale to the highest bidder. And I don't think that's a particularly good way to choose a standard.
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
All I know is, most of the Brazilian girls I've ever encountered were seriously hot.
A truism, if ever I saw one, just like:
Most of the Brazilian girls I've ever encountered were after my money.
"There is nothing nice about Steve Jobs and nothing evil about Bill Gates." - Chuck Peddle
Somehow I've got a feel what if me, tux and few friends showed up at the Danish standardizations body people on the street would look weird at us... And that would be it... :)