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Norwegian Standards Body Members Resign Over OOXML
tsa writes "Ars Technica reports that 13 of the 23 members from the technical committee of the Norwegian standards body, the organization that manages technical standards for the country, have resigned because of the way the OOXML standardization was handled. We've previously discussed Norway's protest and ISO's rejection of other appeals. From the article: 'The standardization process for Microsoft's office format has been plagued with controversy. Critics have challenged the validity of its ISO approval and allege that procedural irregularities and outright misconduct marred the voting process in national standards bodies around the world. Norway has faced particularly close scrutiny because the country reversed its vote against approval despite strong opposition to the format by a majority of the members who participated in the technical committee.'"
Microsoft seems to want to to take over ODF too.
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20080825162905645
Apparently they are not happy there is a working specification in the wild. It being a standard must hurt even more.
This list can go on and on because M$ is a huge company wasting lots of money. What's hard to find are unqualified successes - products that people actaually like and want. The failure of their new OS and Office should be crippling blows they can't hide with novel licensing schemes like "Assurance" programs for big dumb companies and "free downloads" at Universities that cost students hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees.
Erris
Mactrope
gnutoo
inTheLoo
willeyhill
westbake
Odder
ibane
myCopyWrong
right handed
GNUChop
All these accounts belong to the same person And he's getting modded up? Where do I sign up
for this deal? Where I can game Slashdot so blatantly and be rewarded for my troubles?
Once you've crossed that threshold, whatever you had to say is completely irrelevant. I don't care
who you are. Rules exist in online communities for a good reason, and this... sorry, shitstorm of
"I agree with you" replies by a single person is just too much.
Ahem. Linux Is Not UniX. Linux owns the big iron these days, holding over 85% of the Top500. It's pretty dominant on the small end too, with home routers and file servers being the extreme of that bracket. The middle is getting squeezed out as thin-is-in netbooks and nettops push into the mainstream.
Unix was never open source until Open Solaris (the provenance of which is still subject to vigorous debate).
But of course you knew that. I was a Unix admin in 1984. At the time it was the stuff. Unfortunately because it was born before the age of software as property it wasn't designed to be protected from the greatest threat progress has ever faced: intellectual property lawyers. Linux was.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
But of course you knew that.
Of course. But what that comment referred to was the lawsuit that effectively ended Unix' chances at the time, but spurred all the BSD spinoffs and later Linux. Maybe I had the year wrong, that was during the time I took a sabbatical from Unix hacking to pursue professional bowling.
I was a Unix admin in 1984. At the time it was the stuff.
Ah. Right on and yes, Unix was very much the cutting edge then.
Now that I think about it, I'm at the tipping point. I started with Unix in late 1981, Linux in late 1995 and I have very nearly spent more time with Linux than Unix. Unix in the form of its descendents Linux and Mac OS X is still very much alive. Powerful, fast and it doesn't crash, so it's still the stuff.
No, BSD is not Unix. To say that BSD is Unix is perhaps like saying that grass is rice. That's not quite correct. Some grasses are rice. Some grasses are differently purposed and differently used. They may share some genetic material but a putting green is not a bowl of cereal.
However, all rices are grasses. All of the currently used Unixes owe the vast majority of their genetic material to the University of California at San Diego and Berkeley. It would be fair to say that modern Unixes are all Berkeley System Developments with proprietary "enhancements". This is perhaps the acknowledgment you were looking for. That's not the same thing as saying that BSD is Unix.
But the whole of a Unix was never Open until Open Solaris, which as I said is still in doubt. In fact, since Open Solaris hasn't been accepted by The Open Group, who bought the name "Unix" and certify Unix systems, it's not a Unix either. Nor is any particular flavor of BSD.
And still... Linux Is Not UniX. It was never intended to be. Linux is Linux. It's its own brand and that's all it needs to be. It doesn't need to carry forward the heritage from the Information Science pirates of a byegone era. To the extent that it pays homage to the great minds that went before, it's standing on the shoulders of giants as all great art does. It doesn't steal their intellectual property -- it just acknowledges the best of their ideas in new and creative ways and creates on that foundation new expressions that, in our litigation constrained environment, can be used and expanded upon freely.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I disagree.
There are much scandals because of transparency.
Opposed to other countries where everything happens under the hood.
No, GNU's not Unix.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
Aside from the fact it is fairly likely a human did actually edit the translation, Norwegian (and all Scandinavian languages with it) has a syntax that is quite similar to English, except for some rules like the verb always in second position, as in German. (Yes, I speak Norwegian).
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
Actually, I cleaned up the mechanical translation after if was first posted here; http://www.noooxml.org/forum/t-93970/norwegians-leave-their-standards-body-in-protest The mechanical translation was pretty good, but still needed 15 minutes of editing.
Ibane, Odder and Whiteox are all twitter sockpuppets. The current list is:
Please read the full, but incomplete, description
This is true now, but not in a historical context. After the AT&T lawsuit, AT&T UNIX was found to contain BSD code, and BSD was found to contain only a few headers from AT&T, which were subsequently replaced. The subsequent 4BSD releases were both UNIX and open source. The assignment of the UNIX trademark to the Open Group happened much later, and it wasn't until 1993 that the UNIX93 specification was released, which redefined what UNIX meant. Oh, and The Open Group didn't buy the name, it was given to them by the Open Software Foundation, who were given it by AT&T.
Before 1993, UNIX meant 'a descendent of AT&T UNIX, source compatible with with programs written for this operating system.' After 1993, it meant 'an operating system conforming to the UNIX93 specification and certified as conforming by The Open Software Foundation.'[1] Note that neither of these is a subset of the other. A Linux distribution[2] could be certified as SUS conforming and then it would be UNIX (according to the post-1993) definition, but it would not be according to the pre-1998 definition. All BSD systems are UNIX according to the pre-1993 definition, but only OS X 10.5 on Intel[3] is UNIX according to the newer definition.
[1] After 1998, it meant 'an operating system conforming to the Single UNIX Specification and certified as conforming by The Open Group.' It was redefined in 1995, 1998, and 2003, and so some systems in each of these years went from being UNIX to being not-UNIX, due to increasing demands by the standards.
[2] The Single UNIX Specification covers a load of userspace utilities, including the C compiler and shell, and defined the functions the C standard library must implement, so Linux alone can never be SUS certified. A minimal GNU/Linux system conforming to SUS would have around an order of magnitude more GNU code than Linux code. A BSD/LLVM/Linux system could also, potentially, be certified, or one containing userland stuff taken from OpenSolaris or even something like Minix.
[3] Certification is per version and per platform. As such, Solaris is usually not UNIX - only the major releases are certified and some are only certified on SPARC, not on x86. Note that the other versions are still able to pass the tests, it's just that no one wanted to spend money getting them certified.
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