Article is BS? (Score 2, Interesting)

While MS pulled some dirty tricks to get OOXML approved and many of us are rightfully questioning ISO's credibility, this article appears to be (at best) sensationalizing things according to one of the arstechnica comments:

Lars Marius Garshol
This article is basically bullshit.

What's happened here is that lots of people joined the committee to oppose the standard, and while in the committee that's all they've done. Now that OOXML has been approved, they no longer have any reason to be in the committee, so they are leaving. That's hardly the committee imploding.

So let me say this again: not one of these people have done anything in this committee other than oppose OOXML being taken up as a standard. These people are not key people in the committee. They did try to get other people in the committee to join them, but nobody else wanted to leave in protest over this.

What they are, however, is media-savvy. They've worked on all kinds of IT-related advocacy (anti-DRM, pro-open source, etc etc), so they send out a press release stating that this is a big protest, and the committee is imploding etc etc. This article is basically that press release translated to English and prettied up to look like an article.

I guess at this point people will be wondering how I know this. I've been a member of this committee since 2001, and I know many of the people on that list personally. I voted against OOXML, because I thought it wasn't ready to become a standard. The trouble is: however much you may hate Microsoft, this article remains a piece of useless propaganda.