ISO Rejects OOXML Protest Appeals 258
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."
ISO is dead (Score:5, Insightful)
RIP ISO 2008
Re:What you can do? (Score:5, Insightful)
Historically, it always ends in fighting.
Armed revolution.
Foreign takeover.
Collapse into anarchy.
Breed like rabbits, vote against the current leaders, and get labeled undesirable and attacked.
Pick your poison.
ISO=I Sold Out (so F***en shut up) (Score:5, Insightful)
Nice to see that the price for ISO members was high enough to prevent appeals from going through.
Standards for sale.
Act now before the prices go up.
Re:What you can do? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:standards are falling (Score:3, Insightful)
What you say is certainly true, but my point is not anti-MS specifically, but is a much more general one. We all have to live by standards (that's why we have law) and if some do not comply it inevitably causes chaos. While the transgressors often benefit, others suffer. Normally one 'standard' wins the battle of public aceptance, but it's often not the best one, it's the one that's promoted by people who are prepared to do whatever is necesary to win! What's best for the majority is a side issue, and this can't be good.
Re:MS (Score:1, Insightful)
Because Sun, IBM and other people who are inherently hostile to Microsoft control ODF. If Microsoft had adopted it and then went to them with a change to support something specific to MS Office they'd get the cold shoulder. Whether people like to admit it or not, Office is much more than a word processor and a spreadsheet (see SharePoint, etc.), has a hell of a lot more features than OpenOffice and its release cycle is much more active. So Microsoft can't afford to be screwed by the people who control the standard. Eventually they'd be forced to come up with their own version of it, and 'round the bush we go again with "OMFG embrace, extend, etc".
Not that OOXML is better, or even particularly appealing. But Microsoft does have the de facto standard (by sheer installed base weight) and what is pretty much the reference platform for office suites. So there's no way in hell that they would have adopted ODF. And I don't think any of their customers would have wanted that at all.
Personally, given the fact that they've opened up the binary format now, I plan on using the normal .doc format in the near future. I'm not interested in XML formats, regardless of who where they come from.
Re:standards are falling (Score:3, Insightful)
My point is that "respected" bodies like ISO aren't falling. They've hit the lowest ground years (and in some cases, decades) ago. This particular event is nothing new: its always how it has been, and why most of these standards suck ass, from ISO to the W3C and beyond. It didn't reach a new low or anything, it has done much, much worse.
The whole idea of "independant standard bodies" is about as flawed as the idea behind software patents. It simply cannot work, and I'm not sure what the alternative is.
Re:Standards? (Score:4, Insightful)
I think that the ISO just proved they are just another group of administrative people and have nothing to do with good reliable standards.
ISO/OSI 7 layer model, anyone?
its a paper thing but almost never real running code. CMIP anyone? no? you prefer snmp which actually WORKS and is a real standard?
yes, ISO is a laughing stock. the wars between the IETF guys and the OSI guys were funny to watch some 20 yrs ago. IETF did real stuff and OSI just measurebated (yes, intentional misspelling).
nothing really new here.
Re:Maybe now someone can investigate IBM (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Cooler heads prevailed (Score:5, Insightful)
Seems like "Because we hate Microsoft" isn't a compelling enough reason for the ISO.
True, but "unimplementable" should be.
Re:standards are falling (Score:3, Insightful)
XHTML2 may be a political mess, and while it flatlines, HTML5 (a technical mess) is being prepared to be forced down our throats... get ready to choke on a big mouthful of bloat, tag soup, and presentational tags.
At least the ISO has some authority (rotten as it is), but the W3C is impotent, and has been for years.
Re:Who cares? (Score:5, Insightful)
The damage to the standard has been done, but by outright rejecting the protests, ISO is also irreparably damaging its reputation. That damage could have been mitigated. Instead, they covered their ears and screamed "LA, LA, LA, LA, LA! I CAN'T HEAR YOU!" like a petulant five-year-old child.
Today, they might as well have released a press release that said, "We are a standards body that represents the desires of the highest bidder. Screw you all." That's certainly the way the entire open source community is going to interpret this. The result can be nothing less than a large percentage of people who should care about ISO standards replying, "Screw you, too." No other outcome is possible at this point; they have effectively marginalized themselves in the eyes of the technical community---probably irrevocably so. In the eyes of the community, the ISO simply no longer matters, or more accurately, must be completely ignored for the good of standardization.
Or, in government terms, "One wrong turn deserves another."
Re:Better Articles (Score:3, Insightful)
A microsoft paycheck ?
Re:standards are falling (Score:5, Insightful)
Then maybe it's time we started demanding standards that were truly fit for purpose. That could be the one true thing to come out of this mess. It it raises general in the technical community of how badly broken ISO is, then maybe we're seeing the first steps on the road to a workable standards process.
In any event, there's nothing to be gained by accepting the status quo, and everything to gain from making a fuss. Good standards are important. If ISO can't deliver them we need a standards body that can.
I think you're conflating two ideas there. Firstly, there's the notion of a standard is a technical specification that (I expect and demand) everyone can implement and conform to. Secondly, there's the notion of a sort of government monopoly - in the sense that if YoYoDyne Inc control Standard X and the govt mandates that all frobnitz conform to Standard X, then only YoYoDyne can practically market frobnitz.
The point I think you're missing is that if a standard is a standard in the first sense, then the abuse implicit in the second scenario is impossible. It's not that standards are inherently broken, it's that closed, proprietary standards are broken. And so the problem comes back to IP rather than standards, per se.
Re:Cooler heads prevailed (Score:5, Insightful)
I guess most of the countries' representatives ond't effectively govern as well as you could. Too bad you can't rule the world and bring us the Utopia in your head :)
Who do you think that these wonderful leaders are? They put their pants on one leg at a time just like you and me. Most of the bureaucrats who prepare these decisions are no more educated than you or I. Governments, even authoritarian ones, are the people.
What's more, I live in a democratic republic, and in such a system, the people must participate or it fails. Questioning government positions is part of what you call a country's "political discourse," which is necessary for the society as a whole to come to a coherent decision that expresses itself in elections.
Re:This is what you complain about? (Score:5, Insightful)
Last year I was in a car accident. Someone rear-ended me and totaled my car. The insurance agent called me, and without seeing the car or knowing any facts, said I was 15% liable for being rear-ended. I didn't speed, I stayed in my lane, etc. I called a lawyer who said I was screwed. There wasn't enough money to justify fighting the case in court. The body shop guy said he saw it ever day in my state, that the insurance company wouldn't pay the full claim and just screwed people if the case was small enough to stay out of court. He saw someone parked on the street had their car totaled, and the insurance company said they were partially liable for being parked on the street legally. If the car wasn't on the road, it never would have been hit.
I was furious, so I called my state senator to talk about the partial liability law. We have term limits, so he wasn't up for reelection and wouldn't personally benefit, but he called me back several times to get info. He researched the law, and several cases like mine where we were ripped off. Then he went into legislation and fixed the law.
Sometimes there are a few decent people in office who want to do good. But if you never bring these things to their attention, nothing will ever be done.
Contacting your elected officials may not work, but it beats doing nothing.
Re:What you can do? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.)
I'm sure Microsoft are much happier with the idea of tweaking the XML output in a future service pack then they are with having to compete on a level playing field with OpenOffice.
Re:What you can do? (Score:5, Insightful)
Furthermore, Microsoft said they won't even attempt to get Office 2007 to support it via a Service Pack. Instead, they won't attempt to support that standard until the next version of Office at the earliest, and that could mean at any point in that product's life span.
Re:Cooler heads prevailed (Score:5, Insightful)
I tend to look at it like this...
If nobody speaks up, Microsoft has won. There are a lot of underhanded business practices that MS has "gotten away with" because nobody cared to speak up. If people just let it die off, it opens door for other companies to undermine the standards practices because "people will soon forget."
Re:Cooler heads prevailed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:MS (Score:5, Insightful)
They don't even need the appearance.
They just have to match the legal requirements.
It is like the word games redefining torture as not being torture.
It is like defining a rope with a hook as a "braking system".
If the law says torture is illegal, just make sure your actions are legally not torture.
If the law requires a braking system, just make sure a rope with a hook is defined as a braking system.
If the law requires and open standard, just make sure some government or standards body calls it an "open standard". It does not have to actually be open.
Re:Paid for Fair and Square (Score:3, Insightful)
But then, Slashdot is now a pro-Microsoft camp - so why all the belly-aching? I see so much praise heaped up on Microsoft here nowadays that I wonder if they'd forgotten OSS and *nix which was their original focus and forgotten the damage Microsoft has perpetuated on the computing industry as a whole. After all, it's not FAT32.com - it's Slashdot.com - but then who here even knows what that stands for anymore?
Uh... WTF? Is this just stuff added onto the end of your post to get extra modpoints because your point is just that Microsoft bribed people.... with 0 evidence that bribery took place? I'm not saying that MS is squeaky clean in all this, but you just made a nebulous accusation without backing it up with substance, and then spent the bulk of your post on psychological misdirection to pander to Slashdot's moderators.... Hey wait! All flash and no substance, you don't write speeches for politicians do you?
Re:Cooler heads prevailed (Score:4, Insightful)
anybody who doesn't see SharePoint as pure lockin (Score:3, Insightful)
Deserves what they get.
To anyone even moderately clueful, even from 200 yards the whiff of SharePoint says: Run away! Do not walk, run! This is not going to help you or your business in any way! This is a tarpit from which you and your data will never escape. You will be tied into Windows and whatever other tortures arrive down the pike - if you don't Just Turn Around Now and RUN! Microsoft has PLANS for you and your money... Locking up your data forever is just a means to an end...
It's extortion. Theft. Deception. And it's time we stopped tolerating it, because we know better - the Open Web itself is proof of technology and ideals that are the civilised alternative to anything Microsoft ever plotted.