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.'"

Comments

Microsoft at its best

[jhol13]

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.

What the hell

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:How soon people forget ...

[symbolset]

This was the same state Unix was in around the early 1990s. We're not dead yet! In fact, we've taken over the large computer market since then.

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.

ISO has lost its street cred so expect an Open Source replacement. Open Standards benefit everyone, so I expect someone to fill in the gap.

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.

Re:Conflicted

[Anonymous Coward]

I disagree.
There are much scandals because of transparency.
Opposed to other countries where everything happens under the hood.

Re:The Inquirer story has a translation

[howcome]

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.

Re:How soon people forget ...

[TheRaven64]

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.