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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.
Really, I really mean this question.
Funny, there are some Chinese guys here that sell ISOs in some sort of garage sale...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
... 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.
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
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.
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.
No, it's not simple. A lot of governments and businesses have rules implemented that say that they have to work with standards as much as possible. It is now possible for Microsoft to monopolize the office market further by waving the ISO flag at them.
This means that there is less incentive to move towards open and broadly implemented standards for both governments and big businesses. In turn, that means that Microsoft Office will remain something everyone expects you just have on your PC. Think about schools that give kids assignments in MS Word and Excel. Think about bosses that send schedules to employees in those formats. Think about governments that makes documents available for download in those formats. Then tell those people you don't own a license for MS Office, and look at their response.
ISO has put Microsoft in an ideal position to further conquer the market for office suits, the market for operating systems and the emerging market for online office service. I care about that.
Free beer is never free as in speech. Free speech is always free as in beer.
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 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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
MS has already stripped ISO of legitimate credibility, by proving that it can be bought.
I don't see why undermining them as a standards organisation means Microsoft win. There are other bodies that can serve the same purpose, either recognised with some sense of official standing in a community, or simply producing de facto standards that people follow by mutual consent or from practical necessity.
For example, while there actually is an ISO standardised version of HTML4, most of the "web standards" are not ISO recognised at all. And yet, here you are, reading this, and it probably looks pretty much how I and the Slashdot admins intended on your screen just as it does on mine. The W3C itself uses the term "recommendations" rather than claiming to define "standards", which I think is good form on their part, but almost everyone who makes browsers except for Microsoft treats the W3C as a standards-defining body in practice, and even MS acknowledge the W3C's existence.
Other effective standards have come about because of sheer industry power, with Microsoft's own, IE6-compatible flavours of HTML and CSS probably the most common example in the WWW area.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Groklaw has more on this.
you had me at #!
No, not at all.
Firstly, Microsoft's Office 2007 product does not implement the ISO/IEC DIS 29500 (OOXML) standard.
Secondly, ISO/IEC 26300:2006 (OpenDocument, or ODF) is also a standard that the office market can wave right back a Microsoft.
No, Microsoft is not in such a position at all. Microsoft has no product to market that implements either of these competing standards.
OpenOffice.org, KOffice, Google Docs, NeoOffice, Zoho, IBM Lotus Symphony and Corel WordPerfect Office X4 are all competing products in the Office market right now that implement the ISO/IEC 26300:2006 (OpenDocument or ODF) standard. Take your pick.
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
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?
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.
The whole point of a standard is that it's a document you can point at and say "We want your product to do this".
The whole point of ISO is that they're a respected international organisation which publishes these standards so there's no confusion when you say "We want your product to follow ISO standard 1234567890" - and you can be reasonably confident that even if the standard isn't fantastic, it's at least something you can all agree on.
Once ISO start publishing "standards" which for whatever reason you can't usefully point to and say "We want your product to do this", the point in their existence evaporates.
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.
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.
If you think about it really hard, it may just be that Mr. Opportunist was making the exact same frikkin point but in a humorous and less labored way.
Mod me down but I couldn't help myself.
I'm sorry if I haven't offended anyone
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!
...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..."
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!
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