Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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?
I RTFA (I know, I know) and that is basically what they're talking about doing.
However, the whole point of the article is that this has deeper implications. From TFA:
I don't think I need to clarify that any further.
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.
Groklaw has more on this.
you had me at #!
You must not have been following the news. How is OOXML an open standard, when it is full of "implement this feature just like Excel 97" when the Excel 97 documentation is missing/unavailable?
Oh come on.
Everywhere *BUT* the US A4 is the standard, just like everywhere but the US metric is the standard. As for thickness (weight) the standard is you specify in GSM (grams per square meter), with 80 being standard office paper.
Give me any two C99 compilers on the same platform and some C99 code and it'll work. Endianess is explicitly implementation dependent as are a few other things. Almost every platform difference is due to OS libraries or libc, neither of which the compiler has anything to do with.
I know ISO standards aren't perfect, but they sure as hell are usually a lot better then the crap we saw this time.
/* FUCK - The F-word is here so that you can grep for it */
That's not what people are complaining about. Yes, different non-ISO compliant implementations of C will not be compatible, but then the vendor isn't using standard compliant C is it? Now, people have bitched for a long time, so market forces caused companies to change their tune and today any serious compiler is almost fully compatible with the standard. I can't remember the last time my C code wouldn't compile in both gcc and visual studio for reasons other than having to use different libraries for different operating systems (which aren't defined in the standard).
As for your paper size example, I don't see how it's relevant to this. When someone sells "letter" sized paper, they don't tell you "it's ISO 216 compliant!" and lie about it. They're selling you something that's not compatible.
What people ARE complaining about is that the OOXML standard is a horrible, horrible standard. For example, what if some large company lobbied for ISO to standardize the letter paper size of 2"x64". Who the hell would use that? The only reason OOXML was supposedly approved was because of corruption all around.
I'm not qualified to comment on whether people are right or not about the OOXML quality, and I personally think that Microsoft seeking a standard at all is already an improvement over what we had before. But if it's really true, then ISO shouldn't be in the business of making a standard out of crappy specifications.
League of Nations?
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
everywhere but the US metric is the standard
Been to the UK lately?
Yes.
By law, goods are sold in metric units.
Paper sizes are metric.
Metric is the system taught in schools and used in engineering.
There are some exceptions, mostly for beer and sprits.
Evil people are out to get you.
...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..."
No, not using ISO units. English is a much bigger language than Chinese, regardless of what the myth says.
Last I heard, there were more Chinese people learning English than the entire population of the United States including our illegals. That's an implicit admission that English is the current lingua franca of the industrialized world.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.