Format Standards Committee "Grinds To a Halt" 271
Andy Updegrove writes "Microsoft's OOXML did not get enough votes to be approved the first time around in ISO/IEC — notwithstanding the fact that many countries joined the Document Format and Languages committee in the months before voting closed, almost all of them voting to approve OOXML. Unfortunately, many of these countries also traded up to 'P' level membership at the last minute to gain more influence. Now the collateral damage is setting in. At least 50% of P members must vote (up, down, or abstain) on every standard at each ballot — and none of the new members are bothering to vote, despite repeated pleas from the committee chair. Not a single ballot has passed since the OOXML vote closed. In the chairman's words, the committee has 'ground to a halt.' Sad to say, there's no end in sight for this (formerly) very busy and influential standards committee."
In absentia (Score:4, Insightful)
So let me get this straight. (Score:5, Insightful)
Allowing mercenary corporate entities to corrupt the standardization process has negative implications? I'm amazed. I never would have guessed that violating the spirit of the rules while abiding by the letter could lead to problems in the future. Nor would I have guessed that punitive/preventative measures would need to be drafted into those rules to prevent abuse.
MSFT knew what they were doing (Score:2, Insightful)
tough shit (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:In absentia (Score:5, Insightful)
Failed due to lack of 50% participation of "P" members...
Countermeasures or Corruption? (Score:4, Insightful)
It will be interesting to see if the ISO fixes this problem (e.g. by withdrawing P status from all the abusers) or not. If ISO decides to do nothing, the only rational reason is to not have to admit that the vote was almost fixed - and that means there is corruption at the highest levels of the organisation.
Hamstrung (Score:5, Insightful)
I've seen this sort of thing happen before, to smaller organizations. You get a huge influx of members for some reason, but then they stop participating. If you didn't anticipate this possibility when drafting your constitution or bylaws, and you have some rule in there that says "changes to the bylaws must be ratified by 50% of the membership" or something similar, you're screwed. You can't change the rules, because nobody shows up, and you can't do anything, because nobody shows up.
Maybe the ISO Standards Committee should dissolve itself and reform under a slightly different name, with a better set of bylaws...
Re:MSFT knew what they were doing (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Were they fictional countries? (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe they could make voting membership in a computer-standards committee contingent on having some sort of viable technology industry or something. (Of course, in a few decades that would probably knock out the United States, the way we're going...)
Re:So let me get this straight. (Score:2, Insightful)
If we knew back when SMTP was created the trouble it would become, it would have been a much more rigorous protocol. DNS has required lots of security implimentations as well. In fact, pretty much any early net technology wasn't built with any safeguards in mind. Everyone was pretty much trustworthy.
Then the general public and businesses started using it and suddenly stupid things and evil things started happening. (Broad brush stroke, yea, but I'm summarizing.)
At one level, there's still a lot of naivety.
Re:tough shit (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:In absentia (Score:4, Insightful)
Someone needs to put a bullet in those people over at Microsoft.
Wow. (Score:2, Insightful)
How freaking important could a document standard (hard to type without a straight face) be, that it needed to be fast-tracked?
(Yes, I know that's not why they attempted to fast-track it.)
They get removed... eventually. (Score:1, Insightful)
However, they do have conditions whereby the non-voters will eventually get removed for missing too many votes. It's just that that will take a while.
Hopefully, they'll add new rules afterwards to keep those folks from rejoining unless they participate in a lot more votes about many different topics (and make them do more than just vote 'abstain' a bunch of times).
This is why.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:So let me get this straight. (Score:3, Insightful)
I think this is one of the main reasons why so much security policy is reactive rather than proactive. Nobody wants to be the person to call out everyone else for being potential criminals, even though everyone rationally knows that it's true.
Re:In absentia (Score:5, Insightful)
It is quite common for the boards of non-profit organizations to have a provision in their bylaws that allows the rest of the board to remove any member who doesn't turn up for a certain number of meetings as well as a provision that lets any member force a meeting in which anyone who turns up constitutes a quorum under certain circumstances. That isn't undemocratic - it just prevents a few members from locking up the organization. I've had to use such provisions with an organization I was involved in. After several failed attempts to get a quorum, we forced one more meeting to be called. When it was one short of a quorum, we invoked the provision that let us call another meeting immediately with those present constituting a quorum. We then removed two board members who had failed repeatedly to turn up and passed the by-law change (announced two weeks in advance as required for such changes) that lowered the ridiculously high quorum requirement. This reactivated a frozen organization.
Re:In absentia (Score:3, Insightful)
- RG>
Re:MSFT knew what they were doing (Score:3, Insightful)
Some people never learn.
Re:gridlock (Score:4, Insightful)
http://i.somethingawful.com/goldmine/02-04-2003/torsoboy.jpg [somethingawful.com]
http://www.somethingawful.com/d/comedy-goldmine/gulf-war-ii.php [somethingawful.com]
Re:Hamstrung (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd like to propose the wording "widespread document-format".
Calling it a standard is too much honour. It implies "interoperability", which clearly was never, is not now and will not be ever on MSFTs agenda.
same as the US elections ... (Score:5, Insightful)
If you limit that again by the fraction of those who go to the polls and have a clue about who the people are they're voting for (usually, they're voting against someone, and don't much care who gets in, so long as it's not candidate X), and are not merely blindly pulling the party lever, then the fraction of intelligent voters in our own system is effectively zero.
It's the death of democracy. As noted by others, if there is no provision to deny eligibility to vote for non-performance on the part of the voters, the system will die. And even if voters do go to the polls but are disgusted by the lack of choice, due to the major parties exercising duopoly control over every aspect of the process, the system dies then too.
It's just a matter of time before some lunatic figures out a way to game the system, either by destroying their opponents (physically, as Hitler and the Brown Shirts did in pre-WWII Germany, or via character smears and lies, as is the tradition in our nation (and several other "democratic" nations)) or wrapping themselves in some demagogic issue and making the election revolve about a single issue. In such circumstances, the aggregate "wisdom of the crowd" is transformed into the lunacy of the mob -- think the French Revolution and Robespierre's Reign of Terror (or our own War on Terror, for that matter).
Once you manage to turn away thoughtful discussion/argument/debate, and limit the process to a small number of controllable groups, democracy dies.
This is the cancer of democratic systems, and the reason why there are no long-running democracies.
Re:tough shit (Score:5, Insightful)
Can you really be that naive? Standards bodies have been corporate battlegrounds ever since they came into being.
Re:Hamstrung (Score:3, Insightful)
There is no way for anybody _including_ Microsoft to implement to OOXML 'standard'. Any such implementation would be sufficiently incompatible with Microsoft Office that nobody would buy it.
Re:Best possible situation (Score:2, Insightful)
Standards aren't compulsory or binding, they are simply a guideline to allow better interoperability between systems. Having a standard created by fiat changes nothing, its still up to each country to decide if its worth complying with.
The fact that your suggesting that having a committee be unable to do anything is better, is baffling, especially when its a committee that is very likely to try and bend over backwards to fast track any standards Microsoft propose, regardless of how useful the standard actually is.
This isn't a case where the entire community has a gained a clearer voice, its a case where the voice has been corrupted to suit the needs of private interests.
Re:Microsoft...AGAIN! (Score:3, Insightful)
can you define that? there is no rule forcing Microsoft to spend its profits inside America.. to hire Americans... to help the people of America, or to give a rats ass about America. Microsoft is a transnational corporation. don't pretend companies are citizens of states. as a living human being citizen you are basically stuck here.. this is your home, your culture, your roots, your identity, (and likely the only place on earth you can't be deported FROM.. well.. until the Bush administration changes that law) so you have a vested interest in making America a beautiful place to live. corporations do NOT have that prerogative. America could explode for all they cared.
People have to look at each and every corporation with an extremely cynical eye.
Re:tough shit (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Unbelievably politically naive (Score:5, Insightful)
(Note, this is different from de facto standards, which use the word "standard" in the context of "it is standard" simply means "common" or "widespread". The
NTSC/PAL being TV standards that mean that Disney, ABC, HBO, etc... all transmit TV in the same way, and that Sony, Phillips, Samsung, etc... can all receive it from any of these. If Disney transmitted in a secret, non-standardised format and required you to purchase a Disney TV to view Disney channels, they'd have a monopoly on TV sales from anyone who wanted to watch Disney on TV.
You could use almost any standard in any field of engineering for the same argument. I'd be hard pressed to find any that support yours. Name 5
Re:Hamstrung (Score:5, Insightful)
No, the standards process is about increasing the size of the market by making it efficient for vendors to sell to customers and for customers to buy from them. In a big, efficient market vendors have more customers and customers have more choice, so it's win all around. If everything that ran on electricity had its own unique plug, people wouldn't bother getting their houses wired, at least beyond light fixtures, which hopefully have standard sized bulbs.
If the standards process was really about recognition, there's be no need for it. If everybody has to use Word format because Microsoft is dominant, then there's no reason to go through the charade of committee meetings and product certification. The reason you need the whole bureaucratic procedure is to get competing vendors to agree to do things the same way. In a monopoly dominated market, there is no reason for the monopolist to participate in a standard that will undermine its monopoly. However there is every reason to interfere with the standards setting process.
You are misleading (Score:5, Insightful)
You say, "Word is a standard the way that FAT is a standard" The problem is, we are not talking about the word files that we've all grown to know and hate, we are talking about a new kind of word file that doesn't even exist yet.
Your choice to view the implementations in such a manner totally glosses over the fact that the Microsoft spec is woefully incomplete, there is no way for anyone besides Microsoft to actually implement it, unlike SPF and SenderID, which are relatively trivial network protocols.
You talk about defacto standards and the fact is that this is not even a defacto standard, as not even Microsoft has committed to implementing it. How can you have a defacto standard when there are no implementations?
What you are really saying is that Microsoft is going to jam this thing down our throats, whether we want it or not.
You are really just a troll, in the most insidious sort of way.
Re:That gives me an idea... (Score:3, Insightful)
ISO is enormously huge and important. It isn't limited to technical specifications. It also define standards for lots of other stuff like food, screws, cars, and timber.
The people who created OpenISO are clueless. Have you seen their website [openiso.org]? They, like many, don't seem to realize that ISO does more than just approve technical documents.
So here's where the problem is:
ISO > JTC1 > SC 34
And you want to replace all of ISO? That's ridiculous!
And why is it that people talk so much about replacing ISO, but nothing about replacing IEC? Is it because their name comes second in "ISO/IEC", and nobody's gotten around to looking after the slash yet?
ISO isn't going anywhere. The joint committee between ISO and IEC isn't going anywhere. Maybe subcommittee 34 of the joint committee between ISO and IEC will be dissolved, but that is nowhere near the enormity of dissolving ISO.
Re:So let me get this straight. (Score:3, Insightful)
Usually, the more detailed the rules, the more subject they are to unstoppable abuse and/or being unenforcable.
Attitude is everything-- Basketball in the 70's was not the same as basketball today because of attitude towards the game. Good sportsmen are viewed as stupid today- and were admired back then.
When you have to start codifying things explicitly, you have probably lost what was good about the activity.
Re:Hamstrung (Score:3, Insightful)
The sarcasm was the attitude I was referring to.
Writing standards is most of my job. Situations like this one in which we have partisan factions are not helpful to the process. At root the problem here is that people think that they can use the standards process to have ODF declared a standard and then have government offices and the like required to use Open Office (and probably Linux &ct.) as it is 'the' 'standard'.
It does not work that way. The US government has tried that in the past with pretty dire results. Believe it or not I still have to deal with the fallout from the 1980s decision to make OSI the federal standard. There are still folk plugging away trying to get X.500 (not LDAP) deployed in the hope that once that has been achieved it will form the hub that the rest of the OSI stack is deployed around. We had to wait for some people to retire to remove their schemes.
I could not care less whether Office or OpenOffice is the standard in ten years time. They are both relics of 1980s technology at best. If you want to beat Office write something better.
That what we did with the Web. The Web was not a clone of Hyper-G or Gopher, it was something better. People often overlook the fact that the Web was by any measure the most successful open source effort in history. We put the code into the public domain precisely so that others could use it.
It would not be at all difficult to write something better than Office which is a collection of five or six separate programs with not very good means of integration. Spreadsheets are a poor means of manipulating information, Mathematica and its ilk are much better but also limited.