Re:Draft OpenISO.org "Problem Report" entry
on
RTF Vs. OOXML
·
· Score: 1
To be fair, ODF started out as a documentation of the 'StarOffice XML' format.
True. And that is in fact a legitimate starting point for the process of developing a standard. Of course back when it was just the 'StarOffice XML' format, no-one insisted on pushing it down everyone's throat as an international standard. Rather, Sun got all interested parties together, and a real standard was developed by means of requesting and taking under consideration everyone's input on needed changes.
OOo will always follow the standard rather than define the standard. A standard isn't defined by one product, it is something that products follow.
Yes, exactly.
I don't understand why this is so hard for people to understand.
Effective propaganda: The "open" in OOXML's name together with the OOXML specification being called a "standard" by Ecma, etc. We all suffer from information overload and are not able to think though and reach the stage of true understanding regarding all issues. In the absence of any well-known credible and truly objective authorities on the issue, we should not be surprised by the effectiveness of Microsoft's propaganda.
Draft OpenISO.org "Problem Report" entry
on
RTF Vs. OOXML
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Is this how an open standard is developed?
No.
Here's a copy of the draft OpenISO.org "Problem Report" entry for this issue:
Microsoft's attempt to essentially unilaterally dictate office document standards is an abuse of their dominant position
Problem description:
Normally standardization is conducted by means all interested parties
participating in a discussion of the desired features, so that all
interested parties have an essentially equal opportunity to develop
products implementing the standard.
By contrast, OOXML is simply documentation of the document format that
Microsoft's products already use, and there is no indication that
Microsoft would intend to make the details about future versions of
OOXML available to competitors before Microsoft is ready to release
their own implementation of the new features for public beta testing.
Expected impact:
To the extent that OOXML is accepted as a standard, all of Microsoft's
competitors will be encumbered with a permanent economic disadvantage.
Possible solution:
Reject all claims about OOXML in some way being a standard, and take
legal action, on the basis of national and international competition
law, against Microsoft as well as against Ecma and all other
organizations which are guilty of aiding and abetting Microsoft's
anticompetitive actions.
Personally I would like nothing better than for both sides to be willing to push for universal open source adoption of both formats without fear of patent infringement suits.
The patents issue aside, where's the benefit of having two standards? If one standard is chosen, and it happens to be for fundamental design reasons (which cannot be fixed by extensions) less ideally suited for the task that you want to implement, it's still much less work (and much less bug-prone!) to implement it using the less-ideally-suited standard format than having to implement support for two competing standards!
I can't help but think of the claims by Novell's Miguel de Icaza that "OOXML is a superb standard" and Novell's further support for OOXML. (For example, they joined the national standardization committee in Switzerland and probably also other countries and voted in favor of OOXML without having previously participated in the technical discussion of the specification's serious shortcomings.)
hmmm, talking about the need for an insurance against a products bad management decisions and how it could mean fewer developers behind their chosen product just doesn't sound like something you'd want to bring up at a sales meeting if you can help it
What I'm selling is essentially "GNU/Linux with commercial support". The main competitor is Microsoft Windows Vista, which also happens to be a very fine example for discussing how a product's bad management decisions adversely affect customers. Therefore, for my potential customers it is definitely good news that the free software ecosystem provides some degree of isurance against this kind of problem. Note the meaning of the word "insurance". It doesn't imply a guarantee that a problem cannot occur, it just means that if a bad event of a certain type occurse, its adverse effect will be much less severe than it would be in the case of relying on proprietary software (or on software with a free license but without a large community of developers). Also note that in most cases no actual fork happens, the possibility of forking is generally quite sufficient to prevent project leaders from abusing their influence. That's in fact exactly how things are playing out with Gnome and Mono. I believe that Novell's employee Miguel de Icaza (the founder of the Gnome project) would like to make Gnome dependent on Mono, but it isn't happening because it is clear that the majority of Gnome developers would immediately join the Mono-free fork of Gnome. This is what IMO makes Gnome acceptable for business use even in the absence of any trust for Novell.
What do you think will happen when Microsoft shows even just one valid IP claim and goes to collect fees?
Valid patent claims are few and far between. Versions of the affected software which avoid the encumbered programming idea would be created immediately. We would fight back by pushing for a change of patent law and by suing Microsoft on the basis of existing anti-trust law. (What you're suggesting Microsoft might do would be what is called "patent abuse". It's a serious offence.) The earth would continue to rotate around its axis, just like the general trend of more and more businesses switching to free software would also continue. There might be a temporary slow-down of this trend, and Red Hat and others might sue Microsoft for punitive damages for having caused that by means of anti-competitive actions, but when the dust has settled it would be clear to everyone that the free software movement simply cannot be killed, and that would certainly lead to a significant acceleration of the trend of businesses switching to free software.
I was much more concerned about patent issues until I discussed my concerns with a specialized patent attorney. If you're really concerned, I would recommend that you do the same.
If you want to put a putrid taste toward Linux and OSS in managements mouth, do what you are saying, "we'll fork".
When talking with customers I'd of course explain to them what that means from their perspective, namely a kind of insurance against bad management decisions in the projects that develop the software they use.
i do agree, I think we should trust Trolltech more than Novell at this point due to Novell being "in bed" with Microsoft and the head of their cross platform projects being too much of a Microsoft fanboi and not paying attention to Microsoft's history of screwing their partners over IP issues. Mono, Samba, open office are all on the block for Novell to screw up by putting Microsoft "IP" in there "nobody" else can use.
While there is absolutely zero reason to have any trust whatsoever for Miguel or Novell as a whole, the good news is that we have no need to trust them. If they do something nasty to GTK or any other important parts of Gnome, we'll fork.
IMO there's nothing wrong with the decision to deprecate some of the most revulsive misfeatures of OOXML, but there's the very real problem that this could lead some people (in particular in the national standardization bodies that will have the opportunity in March to change their vote about OOXML) to think that these relatively minor changes somehow make OOXML suitable for acceptance as a "standard".
If you agree that this is a real risk, and you're willing to help with doing something about it, please join us at OpenISO.org and help put together a "problem report" document about OOXML that explains the main issues clearly.
I'm sorry, but you're completely out in left field on this. Everyone involved in ISO knows how ISO works, and what Fast Track means. Nobody voted thinking ISO would control it. If they did, then they have no business voting in the first place.
Like probably in many other countries, here in Switzerland the OOXML vote attracted the attention of mostly people who did not have any previous in-depth involvement in ISO/IEC processes. In fact in the concerned standardization subcommittee, there were exactly two people with previous knowledge of how the ISO/IEC process works, namely the subcommittee chairman Mr Thomann and the Ecma secretary-general Mr Sebestyen (who claimed to participate simply as just a member of the subcommittee "of course we want OOXML to be approved", but in reality had much greater influence than any other member). Both of them abused their advantage in this situation of information asymmetry by telling lies about how the ISO/IEC process works and about its criteria.
For example, subcommittee chairman Mr Thomann claimed (with Ecma secretary-general Mr Sebestyen right next to him and not disagreeing) that approving OOXML as ISO/IEC standard would be good for interoperability between OOXML and ODF because the two would then be maintained by the same technical committee of ISO/IEC.
This may be a slippery slope towards trying to forbid usage of the tools as soon as the general public forgets about them being available in the first place.
I'm living in Switzerland and I can assure you that the Swiss public isn't likely to forget about the existence of these tools.
The reason why we got a relatively liberal version of the anti-circumvention law is that the politicians were afraid that otherwise there'd be a successful referendum.
As long as we don't do something stupid like e.g. joining the EU the fundamental situation that Swiss citizens have real voting power isn't going to change.
So... it goes something like: "In order to assure interoperability across systems, we all agree to do $THIS, and pay $COMPANY a $FEE to do it".
Yes, that's the kind of story for which Ecma is pushing for acceptance, hard.
What Microsoft is pushing for is much more subtle -- it doesn't explicitly involve explicitly agreeing to paying the $FEE to $COMPANY, but Microsoft's strategists understand the situation very well so that fundamental market economics will ensure that if we agree to accepting Microsoft's $THIS as an international standard, the $FEE will be paid to $COMPANY, regardless of whether we like it or not, and regardless of whether there are actually any legally valid patents or not.
this is really an honest question: Can standards be patented?
There's currently a big fight going on about this in various standardization organizations.
For example, the rules of the Swiss standardization organization say very clearly and unambiguously that if something is patented, it cannot be a standard.
However, Mr Sebestyen, the chairman of the standardization committee for information technology topics (who is also secretary-general of Ecma) is completely ignoring this rule and instead pushing Ecma's "RAND standards are acceptable" agenda. The chairman of the subcommittee which deals specifically with OOXML is likewise happy to ignore the rules. He is an independent consultant who earns money by representing the interests of companies in standardizations organizations, and who hasn't disclosed whether he's currently getting paid for doing that subcommittee chairman work by a company with a particular interest in OOXML.
At the ISO/IEC level, the rules are less clear. The ISO/IEC directives say clearly that any patents should be disclosed and then it should be decided whether or not to accept the patented technology as a standard anyway, and that this should happen only "in exceptional situations". In practice, this rule is again not followed in the fast-track process, where Ecma again has a lot of influence.
It is in the context of this conflict that I've recently started OpenISO.org, an internet-based standards organization which aims at reviewing proposed standards and other specs in order to determine whether they fulfil a reasonable set of requirements for acceptance as a standard. These requirements include that for any patents, at least a patent non-assertion agreement must be available which must be strong enough to prevent discrimination against Free Software software or against other competitors of the patent holder.
I'm not authorized by Ballmer to speak about what he may have had in mind, if anything, but Microsoft claims that their OOXML file format which they're (despite the initial failure) still trying to get approved as an international standard can be used "on Linux" (this claim was made in the standardization committe on this matter in Switzerland, of which I am a member) and they are offering (unacceptable) terms and conditions for using their patents on this "standard".
Microsoft hasn't honored my numerous requests to provide a list of the patent numbers is question even though I demonstrated that the ISO/IEC directives say clearly that patents should be disclosed.
While the Free Software Foundation Europe
(FSFE) which fought for this long and hard can justifiedly rejoice
(FSFE
press release),
overall, I'm still very unhappy about the state of antitrust
"justice".
The biggest problem is that it took 10 years to get to this point, and
Microsoft still hasn't disclosed the specs for how to make
interoperable products. We're fortunate that the Free Software way of
doing things is rebost enough to survive in spite of this, but
profit-oriented companies simply can't hold out long enough for this
kind of legal system to really help.
What we need is clear legal rules that vendors with dominant market
positions must adhere to genuinely open standards for all protocols
and document formats, and of course we also need a
genuinely non-corrupt standardization
organization Microsoft doesn't sell us something as an "open
standard" which really isn't.
All that aside, OOXML may not be a horrible standard.
I have read significant parts of the MS-OOXML spec and I can assure you that this it would be a horrible mistake to accept this beast as an international standard. The biggest issue are not the (existing, but comparatively minor) technical shortcomings, but the fact that Microsoft's semi-proprietary OOXML standardization strategy is a head-on attack on the existing, technically better, genuinely open standards.
It would significantly help already if ISO/IEC would apply their own policy on patents
which says that if there are relevant patents or patent
applications, these should be disclosed and then it should be
decided whether it is one of the "exceptional situations"
where "for technical reasons" the patented ideas should go
into a standard anyway. [Details: It is required by the
ITU/ISO/IEC patent policy that known patent and patent applications should be disclosed and
then the decision should be made whether the patented technology
should be included in the standard anyway. The
ISO/IEC guidelines for
technical work (ISO/IEC Directives Part 1), (section 2.14 on page 30, this section is
explicitly referenced from the ISO/IEC JTC1 directives) clarifies
that this decision would be made only in exceptional situations and
for technical reasons.]
Unfortunately, very likely due to undue influence of Emca on the
ISO/IEC JTC1 Fast-Track process (ca 80% of their fast-track
submissions are from Ecma, and ISO/IEC seem to consider it good
and valuable to get many such submissions) the ISO/IEC rules about
patent disclosure are not applied to the fast-track process, but
Ecma's much lower standards (requiring only a RAND commitment)
are applied. (To this day Microsoft has not disclosed the patent
numbers of their alleged patent rights claims on OOXML.)
there is no way to fix capitalism. money can buy you influence. even here. if you have enough money that you can pay 40000ppl worldwide you can alos afford to pay a few more to subvert openiso.org if it ever becomes necessary. it will make it hardare but it will not make it impossible.
First of all, the problem of corruption is not specific to capitalism. Corruption is older than capitalism, and there is no country with a non-captitalistic economic system where corruption is not a very significant problem. Therefore I believe that it is fair to say that corruption is fundamentally a problem of human nature, not a problem of capitalism.
However there is a relationship to the ideology of capitalism in that this ideology is based on the assumption that human nature cannot be changed. In addition, much of the scientific research which keeps capitalism going in practice is also based on this assumption.
I this assumption true? I personally believe that this is not the case. There are fascinating historic accounts of so-called "revivals" of Christian religion which show that faith in Jesus Christ, when combined with the right kind of prayer, does in fact have the effect of very dramatically changing human nature for the better.
Now I'm not suggesting that it would be appropriate to pray without also taking intelligent action by designing OpenISO.org so that the organization can be expected to act with integrity independently of any assumptions on whether the people in the organization personally have a high standard of morals or not. My goal with the above argument is just to explain why I consider all arguments to be invalid which are based on the assumption that corruption is an unfixable problem.
Note that the goal of creating a corruption-free standardization organization is not about denying corporations any influence on standardization processes and the resulting standards. The organizational goal is just to have a standardization organization which provides an appeals path for every decision with a guarantee that the appeal will be decided by means of a process with is fact-oriented and as corruption-proof as possible.
I admit that "as corruption-proof as possible" is not the same as "perfectly corruption-proof", but I claim that "as corruption-proof as possible" is much, much better than what is provided by the currently-existing ISO/IEC processes.
Here's an update on the plan: There'll be two legally distinct entities, namely OpenISO.org itself which will be a foundation under Swiss law and in addition a "decision consulting services" (DCS) company which will be incorporated as an normal company under Swiss law. For any dispute within the OpenISO.org there will be an appeals path that allows the dispute to be decided in a professional manner by the DCS company. There will be a contract between the OpenISO.org foundation and the DCS company which guarantees this relationship as an exclusive contract to the DCS company for as long as the DCS company provides an excellent quality of services at a reasonable price. The bylaws of the OpenISO.org foundation will say that OpenISO.org foundation must terminate this contract (and never again make a similar contract with the same company or any other company where a board member or executive of the first DCS company is a board member or executive) if at any time the condition that the DCS company must provide an excellent quality of services at a reasonable price is no longer satisfied.
With this kind of set-up, I believe that all the right incentives for long-term stability of integrity are provided.
Actually, my main worry about openiso.org is how many ISPs will censor a site whose name has "penis" right in the middle. This was a problem for expertsexchange.com at first, until they changed their name to "experts-exchange.com".;-)
Thanks a lot for pointing out this potential issue. I've just registered open-iso.org in order to be on the safe side in case of such censorship becoming an issue, so that OpenISO.org can change its primary domain name to that if necessary, without risk of domain-squatter trouble.
You want to fork a standards organisation, which means that at some point your "standard" and the "standard" standard are going to come into conflict. And guess which one an established engineering organisation is going to go for.
Probably the one which produces documents which are more easily accessible on the internet, more technically reliable, more reliably free of patent issues, and more representative of actual consensus among technologists.
I believe that OpenISO.org can beat ISO on all of these fronts.
Even if you manage to find enough people to follow you, I don't see how you can prevent the sort of corruption and political bullshit that we're seeing right now.
While I can't promise prefection, I can and hereby do promise a genuinely sincere effort of trying to prevent what you call "corruption and political bullshit", and of appropriately dealing with process problems instead of trying to cover them up as much as possible.
I think there is good reason to expect the result of a sincere effort of this kind to be at least significantly better than when no sincere effort of this kind is made.
How? Who decides which alternatives are fact-oriented and principled?
If people could easily agree on on which alternatives are sound, people would do it that way all the time, in most fields of human endeavor. You're taking an unsolvable problem and assuming it's solved.
What can be done is to create an organization that makes it its core competence to make decisions in a principled, fact-oriented manner. (I'm right now trying this in the area of standardization of information and communication technologies.) Of course I can't force anyone to trust this organization. I can just do my best to create an organization which does a good job, and then it's up to everyone to choose to trust this OpenISO.org or ISO/IEC JTC1 or Microsoft's propaganda.
Slashdot Mirror
True. And that is in fact a legitimate starting point for the process of developing a standard. Of course back when it was just the 'StarOffice XML' format, no-one insisted on pushing it down everyone's throat as an international standard. Rather, Sun got all interested parties together, and a real standard was developed by means of requesting and taking under consideration everyone's input on needed changes.
OOo will always follow the standard rather than define the standard. A standard isn't defined by one product, it is something that products follow.
Yes, exactly.
I don't understand why this is so hard for people to understand.
Effective propaganda: The "open" in OOXML's name together with the OOXML specification being called a "standard" by Ecma, etc. We all suffer from information overload and are not able to think though and reach the stage of true understanding regarding all issues. In the absence of any well-known credible and truly objective authorities on the issue, we should not be surprised by the effectiveness of Microsoft's propaganda.
No.
Here's a copy of the draft OpenISO.org "Problem Report" entry for this issue:
Microsoft's attempt to essentially unilaterally dictate office document standards is an abuse of their dominant position
Problem description:
Normally standardization is conducted by means all interested parties participating in a discussion of the desired features, so that all interested parties have an essentially equal opportunity to develop products implementing the standard.
By contrast, OOXML is simply documentation of the document format that Microsoft's products already use, and there is no indication that Microsoft would intend to make the details about future versions of OOXML available to competitors before Microsoft is ready to release their own implementation of the new features for public beta testing.
Expected impact:
To the extent that OOXML is accepted as a standard, all of Microsoft's competitors will be encumbered with a permanent economic disadvantage.
Possible solution:
Reject all claims about OOXML in some way being a standard, and take legal action, on the basis of national and international competition law, against Microsoft as well as against Ecma and all other organizations which are guilty of aiding and abetting Microsoft's anticompetitive actions.
The patents issue aside, where's the benefit of having two standards? If one standard is chosen, and it happens to be for fundamental design reasons (which cannot be fixed by extensions) less ideally suited for the task that you want to implement, it's still much less work (and much less bug-prone!) to implement it using the less-ideally-suited standard format than having to implement support for two competing standards!
That is not true.
For example, their active support for Microsoft's attack on the ODF standard can IMO only be seen as an aggression against the FOSS community.
I can't help but think of the claims by Novell's Miguel de Icaza that "OOXML is a superb standard" and Novell's further support for OOXML. (For example, they joined the national standardization committee in Switzerland and probably also other countries and voted in favor of OOXML without having previously participated in the technical discussion of the specification's serious shortcomings.)
What I'm selling is essentially "GNU/Linux with commercial support". The main competitor is Microsoft Windows Vista, which also happens to be a very fine example for discussing how a product's bad management decisions adversely affect customers. Therefore, for my potential customers it is definitely good news that the free software ecosystem provides some degree of isurance against this kind of problem. Note the meaning of the word "insurance". It doesn't imply a guarantee that a problem cannot occur, it just means that if a bad event of a certain type occurse, its adverse effect will be much less severe than it would be in the case of relying on proprietary software (or on software with a free license but without a large community of developers). Also note that in most cases no actual fork happens, the possibility of forking is generally quite sufficient to prevent project leaders from abusing their influence. That's in fact exactly how things are playing out with Gnome and Mono. I believe that Novell's employee Miguel de Icaza (the founder of the Gnome project) would like to make Gnome dependent on Mono, but it isn't happening because it is clear that the majority of Gnome developers would immediately join the Mono-free fork of Gnome. This is what IMO makes Gnome acceptable for business use even in the absence of any trust for Novell.
What do you think will happen when Microsoft shows even just one valid IP claim and goes to collect fees?
Valid patent claims are few and far between. Versions of the affected software which avoid the encumbered programming idea would be created immediately. We would fight back by pushing for a change of patent law and by suing Microsoft on the basis of existing anti-trust law. (What you're suggesting Microsoft might do would be what is called "patent abuse". It's a serious offence.) The earth would continue to rotate around its axis, just like the general trend of more and more businesses switching to free software would also continue. There might be a temporary slow-down of this trend, and Red Hat and others might sue Microsoft for punitive damages for having caused that by means of anti-competitive actions, but when the dust has settled it would be clear to everyone that the free software movement simply cannot be killed, and that would certainly lead to a significant acceleration of the trend of businesses switching to free software.
I was much more concerned about patent issues until I discussed my concerns with a specialized patent attorney. If you're really concerned, I would recommend that you do the same.
When talking with customers I'd of course explain to them what that means from their perspective, namely a kind of insurance against bad management decisions in the projects that develop the software they use.
Thanks a lot for posting this contribution. I'm feeding it into the process for producing the "problem report" document.
While there is absolutely zero reason to have any trust whatsoever for Miguel or Novell as a whole, the good news is that we have no need to trust them. If they do something nasty to GTK or any other important parts of Gnome, we'll fork.
If you agree that this is a real risk, and you're willing to help with doing something about it, please join us at OpenISO.org and help put together a "problem report" document about OOXML that explains the main issues clearly.
Like probably in many other countries, here in Switzerland the OOXML vote attracted the attention of mostly people who did not have any previous in-depth involvement in ISO/IEC processes. In fact in the concerned standardization subcommittee, there were exactly two people with previous knowledge of how the ISO/IEC process works, namely the subcommittee chairman Mr Thomann and the Ecma secretary-general Mr Sebestyen (who claimed to participate simply as just a member of the subcommittee "of course we want OOXML to be approved", but in reality had much greater influence than any other member). Both of them abused their advantage in this situation of information asymmetry by telling lies about how the ISO/IEC process works and about its criteria.
For example, subcommittee chairman Mr Thomann claimed (with Ecma secretary-general Mr Sebestyen right next to him and not disagreeing) that approving OOXML as ISO/IEC standard would be good for interoperability between OOXML and ODF because the two would then be maintained by the same technical committee of ISO/IEC.
I'm living in Switzerland and I can assure you that the Swiss public isn't likely to forget about the existence of these tools.
The reason why we got a relatively liberal version of the anti-circumvention law is that the politicians were afraid that otherwise there'd be a successful referendum.
As long as we don't do something stupid like e.g. joining the EU the fundamental situation that Swiss citizens have real voting power isn't going to change.
Yes, that's the kind of story for which Ecma is pushing for acceptance, hard.
What Microsoft is pushing for is much more subtle -- it doesn't explicitly involve explicitly agreeing to paying the $FEE to $COMPANY, but Microsoft's strategists understand the situation very well so that fundamental market economics will ensure that if we agree to accepting Microsoft's $THIS as an international standard, the $FEE will be paid to $COMPANY, regardless of whether we like it or not, and regardless of whether there are actually any legally valid patents or not.
There's currently a big fight going on about this in various standardization organizations.
For example, the rules of the Swiss standardization organization say very clearly and unambiguously that if something is patented, it cannot be a standard.
However, Mr Sebestyen, the chairman of the standardization committee for information technology topics (who is also secretary-general of Ecma) is completely ignoring this rule and instead pushing Ecma's "RAND standards are acceptable" agenda. The chairman of the subcommittee which deals specifically with OOXML is likewise happy to ignore the rules. He is an independent consultant who earns money by representing the interests of companies in standardizations organizations, and who hasn't disclosed whether he's currently getting paid for doing that subcommittee chairman work by a company with a particular interest in OOXML.
At the ISO/IEC level, the rules are less clear. The ISO/IEC directives say clearly that any patents should be disclosed and then it should be decided whether or not to accept the patented technology as a standard anyway, and that this should happen only "in exceptional situations". In practice, this rule is again not followed in the fast-track process, where Ecma again has a lot of influence.
It is in the context of this conflict that I've recently started OpenISO.org, an internet-based standards organization which aims at reviewing proposed standards and other specs in order to determine whether they fulfil a reasonable set of requirements for acceptance as a standard. These requirements include that for any patents, at least a patent non-assertion agreement must be available which must be strong enough to prevent discrimination against Free Software software or against other competitors of the patent holder.
Microsoft hasn't honored my numerous requests to provide a list of the patent numbers is question even though I demonstrated that the ISO/IEC directives say clearly that patents should be disclosed.
A few months ago (in April) they certainly intended to prepare a GNU/Linux version.
The biggest problem is that it took 10 years to get to this point, and Microsoft still hasn't disclosed the specs for how to make interoperable products. We're fortunate that the Free Software way of doing things is rebost enough to survive in spite of this, but profit-oriented companies simply can't hold out long enough for this kind of legal system to really help.
What we need is clear legal rules that vendors with dominant market positions must adhere to genuinely open standards for all protocols and document formats, and of course we also need a genuinely non-corrupt standardization organization Microsoft doesn't sell us something as an "open standard" which really isn't.
I have read significant parts of the MS-OOXML spec and I can assure you that this it would be a horrible mistake to accept this beast as an international standard. The biggest issue are not the (existing, but comparatively minor) technical shortcomings, but the fact that Microsoft's semi-proprietary OOXML standardization strategy is a head-on attack on the existing, technically better, genuinely open standards.
Unfortunately, very likely due to undue influence of Emca on the ISO/IEC JTC1 Fast-Track process (ca 80% of their fast-track submissions are from Ecma, and ISO/IEC seem to consider it good and valuable to get many such submissions) the ISO/IEC rules about patent disclosure are not applied to the fast-track process, but Ecma's much lower standards (requiring only a RAND commitment) are applied. (To this day Microsoft has not disclosed the patent numbers of their alleged patent rights claims on OOXML.)
First of all, the problem of corruption is not specific to capitalism. Corruption is older than capitalism, and there is no country with a non-captitalistic economic system where corruption is not a very significant problem. Therefore I believe that it is fair to say that corruption is fundamentally a problem of human nature, not a problem of capitalism.
However there is a relationship to the ideology of capitalism in that this ideology is based on the assumption that human nature cannot be changed. In addition, much of the scientific research which keeps capitalism going in practice is also based on this assumption.
I this assumption true? I personally believe that this is not the case. There are fascinating historic accounts of so-called "revivals" of Christian religion which show that faith in Jesus Christ, when combined with the right kind of prayer, does in fact have the effect of very dramatically changing human nature for the better.
Now I'm not suggesting that it would be appropriate to pray without also taking intelligent action by designing OpenISO.org so that the organization can be expected to act with integrity independently of any assumptions on whether the people in the organization personally have a high standard of morals or not. My goal with the above argument is just to explain why I consider all arguments to be invalid which are based on the assumption that corruption is an unfixable problem.
Note that the goal of creating a corruption-free standardization organization is not about denying corporations any influence on standardization processes and the resulting standards. The organizational goal is just to have a standardization organization which provides an appeals path for every decision with a guarantee that the appeal will be decided by means of a process with is fact-oriented and as corruption-proof as possible.
I admit that "as corruption-proof as possible" is not the same as "perfectly corruption-proof", but I claim that "as corruption-proof as possible" is much, much better than what is provided by the currently-existing ISO/IEC processes.
With this kind of set-up, I believe that all the right incentives for long-term stability of integrity are provided.
Thanks a lot for pointing out this potential issue. I've just registered open-iso.org in order to be on the safe side in case of such censorship becoming an issue, so that OpenISO.org can change its primary domain name to that if necessary, without risk of domain-squatter trouble.
Probably the one which produces documents which are more easily accessible on the internet, more technically reliable, more reliably free of patent issues, and more representative of actual consensus among technologists.
I believe that OpenISO.org can beat ISO on all of these fronts.
While I can't promise prefection, I can and hereby do promise a genuinely sincere effort of trying to prevent what you call "corruption and political bullshit", and of appropriately dealing with process problems instead of trying to cover them up as much as possible.
I think there is good reason to expect the result of a sincere effort of this kind to be at least significantly better than when no sincere effort of this kind is made.
If people could easily agree on on which alternatives are sound, people would do it that way all the time, in most fields of human endeavor. You're taking an unsolvable problem and assuming it's solved.
What can be done is to create an organization that makes it its core competence to make decisions in a principled, fact-oriented manner. (I'm right now trying this in the area of standardization of information and communication technologies.) Of course I can't force anyone to trust this organization. I can just do my best to create an organization which does a good job, and then it's up to everyone to choose to trust this OpenISO.org or ISO/IEC JTC1 or Microsoft's propaganda.