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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.'"
I thought it was the 'Take this chair and throw it' department? What gives?
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
My first thought was "It's good that these people are taking a stand against injustice.", but my second thought was "These principled people just resigned. Norway's board is entirely corrupt now." Bummer.
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.
It's a good time to start a new standards body with a new goal.
Table-ized A.I.
For anyone thinks this "conversation" is a little strange, twitter, "right handed" and "inTheLoo" are the same person.
The twitter monologues. Click on my homepage and be amazed.
It's not the ISO entities themselves; it's M$ and their hired cronies.
FTFA:
Actually, you can only read part of the resolutions passed by this stacked committee. As usual, there are deep secrets that the public can't access. That's just one part of what's wrong with those people and why ODF must never fall into their secretive clutches. If it does, I have little doubt that ODF will end up brain dead, on life support, turning blue for lack of oxygen, and then suddenly, sadly, we'll find it dead as a doornail.
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.
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.
I can't believe no laws were broken in this process. Why can't the EU courts take this up?
Easy - a "standards body" is not an entity with any legal weight. All it is is a group of people who get together and make recommendations that others may choose to follow. It's purely a political process but not at all a legal one. The only value that a standards body has is that other entities (EG: companies) trust it to determine what technologies to implement and in what fashion.
For example, there there is no legal requirement that any software vendor implement TCP or IP. But TCP and IP are detailed by the ISOC. If you are a software company, you will implement your TCP stack in accordance with ISOC standards or your implementation will be considered sub-standard.
But if you screw up your implementation, there's little ISOC can do, and nothing legally. They can say you are bad, they can make recommendations against your software. But that's it.
The only weight that a standards body has is that others trust the insight and recommendations made by the standards body. When a standards body can be legitimately accused of shenanigans, that's pretty much it's end.
Goodbye ISO, it's been nice knowing ye...
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
...if (and only if) those principled individuals set up a rival standards organization, have as part of their charter that they refute corruption and automatically negate standards tainted by corruption, re-certify where legal all known-to-be-"safe" standards under their own name, and then lobby research shops and companies hurt by the ISO scandal to work with them. Fork the certification market, but because of rebranding existing standards, no other standards body would ever need to be involved.
Another alternative - standards bodies rely on the income from charging absurd fees for standards, relying more on secrecy than anything. If you pay enough for a standard, you won't just give it away, in theory. If some suitably rich investor with lots of contacts and enough cunning bought up copies of those standards and then just dumped them onto public sites, it could cripple standards organizations for a long time. If it was clearly linked to the ISO debacle, ISO might not be too keen to be seen to complain - most countries deem bribery (even outside of government) a more serious offense than a petty trade secret violation and the press are more into scandals (which ISO is undoubtedly riddled with) than knuckle-rapping.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
When principled people withdraw from an endeavor, they take with them the credibility they leant to it. The credibility of principled participants is all a standards body has to offer.
They are by their action hastening a day when a new, credible standards body can displace the corrupt corpse of ISO.
Good on 'em.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
First among them treason. Agents of a US corporation have subverted major agencies of sovereign nations. Those government employees of non-US nations have by their participation betrayed their nation, the public trust they held in their positions, and their duty. They've done it to preserve the profitability of a foreign enterprise, and by extension line their own pockets.
It's only a matter of time before this is figured out. Heads will roll - in some cases figuratively and in some cases literally.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
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.
Dude, you said the same thing Macthorpe. Can't you keep your sock puppets straight?
He's got a good point though. Your stuff is cluttering up the place too.
It's probably impossible to get you and twitter to take your battles elsewhere, but could you at least try to keep it down a bit? Ignore the stuff already at -1 or 0.
http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2008/10/02/norway-standards-members-walk
I was shocked by how excellent the "rough Google translation" was. Unless they had a human clean up the translation a bit, that is amazingly good English prose for a machine translator to emit. (I can't speak for how accurate it is, but it seems plausible enough.)
English is a mess, with lots of irregular usages. How about Norwegian -- is it particularly easy or particularly hard to translate?
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Normally, it would be illegal for a bunch of companies to get together and collude like they do at a standards body. But anti-trust laws have exceptions to promote the creation of open standards. You would think such an exception would not apply if participants were paid or otherwise compensated/coerced into voting to benefit an existing monopoly.
It's said the next Euro-war will be between Britain and Norway, over the North Sea oil.
What?! Who the hell says that?
Firstly, prosperous modern democracies with large middle classes and a lot to lose do not go to war. There has never been a single case. It is just not going to happen.
Secondly, there could be no victory. If Norway attacked Britain, the rest of Europe would stand by and watch Norway reap its well-deserved stomping from the vastly superior British armed forces. If Britain attacked Norway, the rest of the EU would declare war on them. Either way would bring utter disaster for the aggresor.
If you'd said Russia v. Norway, that would be at least a little more within the bounds of extreme probability, though still highly unlikely. The world will have to get a lot crazier before Russia attacking mainstream Europe over relatively minor resources would be anything other than a suicide mission. Russia may be a little aggresive but they're not insane.
Whoever told that to you is an idiot.
Let my new 7-digit UID be a lesson to all - write down your passwords.
and the parent's parent's parent are modded insightful ?
are there any morons among us, who are STILL saying that microsoft did nothing wrong in this ooxml scandal ?
Read radical news here
Let's see. As of this moment (7:30 AM), this article has 102 posts.
Going through the accounts listed in willyhill's journal, I
count 19 posts by 13 different accounts, most of them in
this thread.
That means that a single person posted 18.6% of all comments
so far on this article alone.
willyhill posted exactly four times on this article, all with the
same account (that I can tell).
Who's 'cluttering up' the place again?
Slashdot is broken when twitter can post some "M$ sux" drivel, have
someone point out he's shilling his own comments with so many accounts,
and then come back with 'dumb fuck' in the same thread - and still be
modded 'interesting'.
But hey, not all of us can have 14 accounts. It takes a special kind
of special to handle that.
Ibane, Odder and Whiteox are all twitter sockpuppets. The current list is:
Please read the full, but incomplete, description
ODF, unlike OOXML, was *not* fast tracked through standards, *and* it is a far more concise standard; OOXML was far too large to reasonably be managed via fast-track IMO, so it shouldn't have been.
It sounds like ODF was pushed through as a standard before it was ready, and Microsoft's reaction was 'well, if you're going to approve one crappy standard for office docs, you should approve ours as well.'
No, MS couldn't really care less, but some of it's clients (large organisations/governments) were starting to demand standards-based software. If MS did care, they would've dealt with it some time earlier.... they had probably a decade or so time to do so.
Also... it's been covered a million times before, but DO NOT FORGET that OOXML currently has absolutely no working implementations. None. There is no software that currently implements this "standard". MS have said themselves that they will not implement it until the *next* version of MS-Office, and strangely, they have said that they will implement ODF in a future service-pack to MS-Office..... but time will tell!
The really odd thing [to me anyway] is that I believe that MS have recently opened up their legacy binary MS-Office standards. If they had done this, documented them, and pushed them through ECMA/ISO then there would perhaps have been less complaints given that the legacy formats are widely implemented and used.
While MS pulled some dirty tricks to get OOXML approved and many of us are rightfully questioning ISO's credibility, this article appears to be (at best) sensationalizing things according to one of the arstechnica comments: