Ecma Receives 3,522 Comments on Open XML Standards 182
Bergkamp10 writes "Microsoft's Office Open XML document format attracted 3,522 comments from the national standards bodies that participated last summer in balloting that has so far derailed the effort to certify the format as an ISO standard.
Brian Jones, an Office program manager at Microsoft and the sole Microsoft employee on the Ecma Technical Committee, revealed the total number of comments that had been received in a blog posting this week. Ecma International is a Swiss standards body that already ratified Open XML and is guiding the format through the ISO.
According to Jones many of the 3,500-plus comments, consisting mainly of objections and suggested changes to Ecma's standards proposal, overlap with one another. "When you group them into similar buckets, it narrows down pretty quickly into a more manageable list," he said. Still, he apparently acknowledged that the number of comments was "still pretty impressive."
Open XML just missed out on a fast-track to approval as an ISO standard in the initial balloting that concluded in early September. Ecma's proposal won a majority of the votes that were cast but not enough to meet the requirements for approval.
Ecma has until January 14 to provide responses and rebuttals to the comments submitted by the national standards bodies. The issues raised will then be debated at a so-called ballot resolution meeting that ISO will hold starting February 25, after which the various national standards bodies will have a chance to amend their vote — the last chance for Open XML to be approved."
More people wasting their time ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Not that my opinion matters, but I think a lot of really talented people are wasting their time getting pulled between OOXML and ODF. Right from Jody Goldberg and a lot of others are spending a lot of time supporting both (and debating why).
And looks like I'm not the only one who thinks that - quoted from Jdub's email to gnome-lists [gnome.org].
I've already shouted down MooXML [dotgnu.info], but I think I'm done talking about this, if I'm not going to do anything in particular (say, does the Koffice ODF guys need some help?).
OOXML The best "standard" money can buy (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:More people wasting their time ... (Score:5, Interesting)
My only question is how much will it cost Microsoft to fix this for themselves? Yeah, mod me down fanboys. But, the reality is this is something Microsoft has done all too often. So have many other companies. This seems to be a huge issue to Microsoft. Maybe they will let it slide for now and spend time building up their bastardized version of open format (truly a closed format) while doing what they can to destroy a truly open format (like they did with so many other standards before), or will they decide to go for the quick kill and buy the standard?
I used to really like Microsoft products. I used to look forward to when they came out with new products. I also used to like Monsanto for their *engineering*. Reality is they both have too much in common. I believe Open Format is far more important than anything else in computing at the moment. The implications for the future and the present are huge. Open Format is truly what is needed to create competition. As long as the documents are interoperable across applications, then the applications will have to compete on best of breed, not best of lock in. And, as a bonus if the formats are open, then the worry of data loss due to format loss or is much lower. How many times I have had to pull something from an archive in the Microsoft world only to find none of the current tools can open a document that old (happens in law and finance). That is one of the reasons everyone I have worked with keeps digital images of their documents. They are still human readable, though it does defeat several of the strengths of digitally stored documents.
What do you all think? Will Microsoft go for the long term takeover or try to force the issue now (and why do you think so)?
InnerWeb
Re:World record (Score:5, Interesting)
-- Louarnkoz
VMS Doc Set (Score:3, Interesting)
The source was also on Microfiche as the poster said. There was even a part number in the price book where you could (for lots of $$$$) buy the sources on MagTape.
However,
The 'Open' in Open VMS Came from the inclusion of a full POSIX Interface & API into VMS.
Those were the days...
I used to work for them and wrote the TSU05 Magtape driver. (well, modded the TS11 driver and added code to do 100 inches/sec )
Re:ECMA (Score:2, Interesting)
Rubber stamped it. Same thing as with C# and the
Re:Slashdot comments about the comments (Score:3, Interesting)
The IETF was recently the target of a clueless lobbying 'campaign' by the FSF. Post after post appeared on the IETF mailing list saying 'no standards based on proprietary technologies', often they were cut and past jobs of the same text.
Saying 'X should not be ratified' is not a response in the standards world, it is an attempt to cast a ballot. To make a response you have to say 'X is deficient because of Y'.
Lobbying a standards process en-mass tends to be counterproductive, particularly if like the FSF people the points you make are not relevant to the issue at hand. IETF policy allows for proprietary technology to become a full IETF standard. In this particular instance the IETF had already had a lengthy discussion of the patent issue and decided to demote the proposal to Experimental as a result.
Sure we know that RMS has people who respond to his lobbying campaigns, that does not make the opinion of RMS carry any more weight. Anyone can drag six people in off the street to make the same point six times.
If the number of comments is going to be the test there is nothing to stop Microsoft, Cisco or the like simply telling their 100,000 odd employees to all submit a comment in favor of their position. Its called an astroturf (fake grass roots) campaign.
Its the same story at the Whitehouse. When I was working on the mass listening project I was told that the way that letters from constituents in Congress get evaluated is that they score telephone calls and handwritten notes highest, form letters and emails get a negligible score (unless an email is clearly a considered response from an individual).