ISO Rejects OOXML Protest Appeals

snydeq writes "ISO and IEC gave OOXML the greenlight after organization leaders rejected appeals from four countries to protest the vote that approved OOXML as a standard. According to an ISO press statement, appeals by the national bodies of Brazil, India, South Africa and Venezuela did not garner support from two-thirds of the members of the ISO Technical Management Board and IEC Standardization Management Board, which is required by ISO/IEC rules to keep the appeals process alive."

Better Articles

[GNUChop]

See NoOOXML [noooxml.org], OpenDot [blogspot.com], NoOOXML [slashdot.org]">Boycott Novell and Groklaw [groklaw.net] for better analysis. People are very angry about this and they should be.

woops, missed the NoOOXML link.

[GNUChop]

Correct NoOOXML link. This was one of the first and best of the bunch. [noooxml.org]

Re:MS

[corsec67]

Some governments are passing laws saying that documents must be stored in a format that is a documented standard.

This is just MS's way of checking that box without actually making their format open.

You are right in that they don't want to open their format, but they need to have the appearance of having one.

Re:What you can do?

[fictionpuss]

Keep using OpenOffice? I know, it sounds drastic but if everyone did and didn't give a damn about what ISO does, wouldn't that be enough?

Thing is, it OOXML were a good standard, or even a standard in the sense that it actually documented something which was implementable.. then there wouldn't be such an outcry.

ISO exists because of an information/communication bottleneck which no longer exists to quite the same extent today. The need to have a central repository of standards outweighed the requirement for fitness of those individual standards.

But, given the multiple documented abuses of process, ISO is actually propelling us rapidly towards a future where more standards are able to be created and maintained outside of the vast bureaucratic machine. I'd credit F/OSS before ISO, but the latter are accelerating the process.

Re:Better Articles

[Anonymous Coward]

interesting - do you have any examples to back this up?

Re:What you can do?

[Adaptux]

What *we* can do when the goverments, corporations and organisations are corrupted and we cant turn to ask help from them, because those who has power, controls those who could help us....?

Despite the name, ISO is not an international organization in the same sense as e.g. WTO or WIPO are international organizations with countries as members. ISO is simply a cartel of national "standardization organizations". Everyone has the right to start an organization to compete with them. I believe that ISO is so strongly committed to acting in the best interest of the dinosaurs that there is no real alternative anymore to doing this. If you agree, please join us at OpenISO.org [openiso.org].

No standards compliant programs

[geopsychic]

The net result of this mess looks like no program can claim to be standards compliant. No one other than M$ will be able to support OOXML due to the incomplete specification and M$ has shown no interest in supporting ODF.

Re:What you can do?

[AJWM]

Microsoft doesn't really give a damn if OOXML passes or not. They just want to be able to say they are standards compliant

Ironically, they are NOT compliant with the version of OOXML that ISO/IEC approved, which isn't the same as the version of OOXML that ECMA originally handed them. (It's not even clear that the ECMA OOXML spec conformed fully to what Microsoft Office does, but that's a moot point now.)

Re:OOo and ODF compliance?

[Tubal-Cain]

Here [griffinbrown.co.uk]. 7,525 validation errors. He's the same guy that reported that MSOffice had about 122,000 [griffinbrown.co.uk] OOXML errors.
Though I admit that I have some doubts about his methodology for the ODF test.

Re:Cooler heads prevailed

[BubFranklin]

You've no idea how incredible that looks in graph...

You've now have an idea how incredible that looks in graph... [google.com]

Re:Cooler heads prevailed

[TheRaven64]

These numbers are highly misleading. They are the result of saving a load of different documents in both formats in OpenOffice and MS Office and comparing their result. They don't include complete coverage of either spec. The numbers for Office 2003 and Office 2007 just show that the same code loads and saves the same file the same way (huge surprise). The result for Office 2008 Mac shows that, even with access to the source code for the 'reference implementation' (TFA's words, not mine) the Office Mac team couldn't read all of the documents this informal test produced.

They also don't show the results of going the other way - saving in one of the other apps and opening in the 'reference implementation.' They are not comparing any product's implementation of either spec. If MS Office produced something completely unrelated to OOXML then you would likely get the same results due to reverse-engineering attempts by the other products.

Re:Cooler heads prevailed

[holloway]

It's currently unimplementable because the ISO OOXML does not exist, no one has seen it, not even the National Bodies who -- as per the rules -- should have seen it in late February.

Further, there are mathematical differences between the spec and what Microsoft Office does [robweir.com]. Now which do you think an implementor will implement? Your interoperability study is based on reverse engineering, not on following any OOXML specification.

Yet further, there are defects remaining in OOXML [robweir.com] that were not addressed and that prevent interoperability. When you try to make a specification in such a short period of time this is to be expected.

Re:Cooler heads prevailed

[Wraith, The]

ODF 1.0 has many defects as well and OASIS is only now trying to correct them several years after submitting the standard to ISO.