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.

Comments

Re:The answer is simple

[jimicus]

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:

Given the organisation's inability to follow its own rules we are no longer confident that ISO/IEC will be capable of transforming itself into the open and vendor-neutral standards setting organisation which is such an urgent requirement. What is now clear is that we will have to, albeit reluctantly, re-evaluate our assessment of ISO/IEC, particularly in its relevance to our various national government interoperability frameworks. Whereas in the past it has been assumed that an ISO/IEC standard should automatically be considered for use within government, clearly this position no longer stands.

I don't think I need to clarify that any further.

Re:What's new there, though?

[laptop006]

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.

Re:What's new there, though?

[TechyImmigrant]

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.