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ISO Approves OOXML
Posted by
kdawson
on Tue Apr 01, 2008 06:50 PM
from the looks-like-no-joke dept.
from the looks-like-no-joke dept.
sTeF writes in, with the hope that this is an April Fools joke. Doesn't look like it though. An article up at Intellectual Property Watch claims they have obtained a document (PDF) enumerating the vote after Microsoft's OOXML won ISO standard status.
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Technology: ISO Takes Control Of OOXML 260 comments
mikkl666 writes "Alex Brown, head of the ISO work group responsible for OOXML, has posted a summary of their latest meeting, and he also comments on the resolutions discussed there. The basic message is that ISO now has 'full responsibility for the standard,' and that several workgroups will be established to work on OOXML. An interesting point here is that 'setting up a maintance[sic] procedure for ODF, and then working on cross-standard initiatives' is one of the explicit goals. On a side note, they also reacted to the very emotional discussion on OOXML by posting an open letter: 'We the undersigned participants ... wish to make it clear that we deplore the personal attacks that have been made ... in recent months. We believe standards debate should always be carried out with respect for all parties, even when they strongly disagree.' As Brown correctly points out, 'This content speaks for itself.' We discussed the approval of OOXML earlier this month."
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Support Needed. (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsofts statement hailed the appearance of extremely broad support for the standard at the end of the ISO voting process.
Broad? I think they mispelled bold faced fraud.
Re:Support Needed. (Score:5, Funny)
Perhaps their OOXML formatters have problems with boldface, and that's just how it rendered.
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Its true (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Support Needed. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Support Needed. (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Support Needed. (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course if the serious nature of the announcement is approving OOXML, I'll be sending them some emails telling them what a disgrace the process has been.
It might not change anything, but I encourage anyone with the ability to send email to do something similar.
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Do they not know their own rules? (Score:5, Informative)
However, how valid are those votes? For example, the ISO/IEC JTC1 directives seem to pretty explicitly forbid changing the vote from "disapprove" to "abstain" like AFNOR (the French standardization organization) did [adaptux.com] (under the influence of heavy lobbying from Microsoft and HP [groklaw.net]).
Abandon All Hope (Score:5, Funny)
Here come Barbra... (Score:5, Interesting)
But witness that recent brand-awareness survey- As understanding of the computer world seeps into mainstream conciousness, MSFT's rotten practices are coming back to haunt them.
Let's hope that the mainstream media picks up on the insanely obvious corruption involved here, and the Streisand Effect kicks in.
I don't think this is the best outcome for open/free standards, but it should still be viewed as a win, long-term.
Thank God (Score:5, Funny)
Thank you MS!
Good Luck. (Score:5, Interesting)
You are right about the size of the market but wrong about how much money it will make you and what tools to use. Sun and IBM will give you PDF of ODF output and a handy database system to keep it all. So can anyone else with Open Office. Some people are going to be automating the process better than others but it's going to be a competitive market. That's the whole point of standards, to avoid the massive cost of reinventing what should be obvious and spend resources on things people actually want. MSXML is going nowhere in a market like that.
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Good. Now at least we know where the filth is (Score:5, Insightful)
Basically, what they just did (Score:5, Interesting)
And yes, many at Microsoft do consider the whole standardization process to be a sham. (I know, because I work there.)
ISO death bell (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps with only gnashing of teeth from the geek side, initially. After some time, say 3 or 4 product cycles, MS's formats, content and programs will have slipped into breaking changes - with various patches, pieces, conversion tools and sunsets. Then and only then, will the true colors of MS's saletroopers, who overrule the tech side, be shown. But you know this - why else would you be trawling the
In other news, the business of writing code to munge data from old MS formats into new MS formats is alive and well. Programmers rejoice! There is an endless market of chagrined middle managers who are willing to port old crap to new crap for good $/hour.
pyhrric (Score:5, Interesting)
(1) if they lost the ISO process then they lost
(2) they won the ISO process then they lost as it forced a deep examination of the standard, and raised critical questions and caused them more problems then it solved.
(3) if nobody else implements this flawed standard then they lose as some Goverments are now also specifying cross platform implementation as well as open standard (perhaps in response to this mess)
(4) if (and this is real unlikely) there are other implementations of this standard (eg OO) then they lose as MS Office is no longer required to be ubiquitous on the desktop
This is NOT really a win for MS the way that I see it. They can spin this how they want and surely get away with it for a large amount of the population - but big business and govermental contracts (where the real money is) are already looking for an escape from propietry formats and have been for a while.
I'm really fucked off about the perversion of the ISO system, the bad practice, the lack of any "technology morals" in decisions that needed to be unbiased. But I am not that upset about OOXML being passed - I really do not think MS has won this one.
The important thing to watch now is how MS spins this and where the important money goes (big contracts, goverment).
Re:pyhrric (Score:5, Informative)
Here are two reports on OOXML that I recently released, one (PDF, 0.9MB) [iso-vote.com] and two (PDF, 0.8MB) [iso-vote.com].
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Agree - easy solution too (Score:5, Interesting)
(a) Require MS to be true to their own standard (or immediately fall foul of anti-monopoly rules - hello EU)
(b) Ensure every procurement decision in favour of MS because of this to REQUIRE to implement MSOOXML as well. No point using it for criteria otherwise.
That way I give it a month before reality hits. And less than that for the EU to collar the b*stards again, and this time it won't be a baby fine because that has proven not to have too much of an effect. A cute punishment would be making ODF compliance mandatory in the EU. Given that they haven't implemented a proper filter this may completely nuke the franchise. And without the Office franchise there isn't much left of MS because brute forcing people into an upgrade to something as bad as Vista hasn't exactly worked out too well. Couple that with sub prime problems and companies as well as end users may start to seek for more economic ways to spend their money.
This story is FAR from over.
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Why no April Fools Today. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why no April Fools Today. (Score:5, Funny)
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Does anybody else... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Does anybody else... (Score:5, Funny)
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End of ISO? (Score:5, Interesting)
An article up at Intellectual Property Watch claims they have obtained a document (PDF)
See the article linked is "PDF"? Why? It is supported on everything down to Symbian S60 handsets and any open source software can support it. People can even race with vendors "reader" software making better ones. That is a real standard which won its place without dirty tricks.
I bet usual suspects like Novell and their mighty Mono/Silverlight innovator Icaza will come up with a thing that supports it to some extent, advertise it and MS will use it as a proof.
Last question: Did gnome people openly critised this decision? On their website?
April 1 could be the end of ISO. Once you lose credibility, you don't get it back. It is not a April 1 joke either. You can even feel that one of the biggest IT scandals is waiting and this time it is not poor open source geeks anymore, it is IBM/Sun and GNU/BSD and various World governments especially those very rich ones who can even say "no" to EU. Don't forget the militaries either.
Re:Finally (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Weirdest April 1st Ever! (Score:5, Interesting)
Should be interesting to see the next moves from IBM and Sun though. Could there be some sort of challenge or appeal coming? I don't think we've seen the end of this.
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Re:I need enlightenment... (Score:5, Informative)
From user's point of view, this rushed standardisation means that the whole point of the standardisation has been defeated in OOXML's case. It also means that we now have two standards that solve the exact same problem, and thanks to the Marketing, the technically far worse format has a chance at winning: If OOXML becomes the dominant format, the promising future from OpenDocument may not be realised. It can be a major setback.
And what was the point of the standardisation? What was the golden promise of OpenDocument? Interoperability, plain and simple.
Simply put: In the current state of affairs, OpenDocument is implementable by third parties. OOXML is not. There can and will be many OpenDocument applications. If OOXML won't get fixed, there will be one and only one application with anywhere near compliant OOXML support.
With OpenDocument, you can edit the documents in any ODF-compliant application - or process them with any external tool, or generate them from scratch programmatically - and there's no problems because the standards is complete, well specified, and not hopelessly tied to one application. OOXML, in comparison, has nothing of this: There's a bunch of nasty features that make writing completely compliant applications difficult, if not impossible. The end result will be that there's one application that processes OOXML "perfectly" (MSOffice) and the rest work when they work (and since consumers expect perfect behaviour, it means they aren't used very much, no?)...
Sure, the interoperability dream is still very much there, because ODF is still out there. It's just that now we have a completely redundant standard that is a) technically inferior but b) Microsoft will make you either use it, or cry and use it.
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