OOXML Denied INCITS V1 Approval 159
Xenographic writes "INCITS V1, the US group responsible for the US vote over whether or not ANSI will grant fast-track approval to Microsoft's OOXML format, failed to reach the 2/3 consensus required to recommend OOXML to ANSI. What makes this vote interesting is the graph in the article, showing all the new Microsoft business partners who joined INCITS just this year to vote for OOXML. The INCITS Executive Board will now deliberate further, until they can come to some agreement on what to recommend to ANSI, but it's pretty clear that Microsoft is pushing OOXML as hard as it can."
Hack Back (Score:5, Informative)
But it is.
The good news is that it appears money can fix this - short money for most (the cost of a couple copies of Microsoft Office). If you have any discretionary budgetary authority and would be adversely affected by OOXML being an ANSI standard, please go here [incits.org], read about the membership process (it appears to cost $800 to be on the technical committees) and fill out the membership form [incits.org]. If you're an academic institution you can get on the technical committees and have an advisory role for $2000.
Yes, the process is broken, but it appears this can be stopped pretty quickly. They're hacking, all we can do is hack back.
It would be great if a hundred universities and a couple hundred Slashdotters' businesses were able to get on the committee by the end of the week. It would reverse the trend, by quite a margin. By all means, try to get the process fixed in parallel, but any such efforts there will likely come in too late.
Re:where is the list of ooxml supporters (Score:5, Informative)
http://v1.incits.org/v1mem.htm [incits.org]
Apart from a few biggies like IBM or Sun, most of them you never ever heard of.
The interesting part what is RH doing there except what MS does, but within the opposite camp? E.g. being there purely to thwart MS' doings.
Microsoft's OfficeOpen XML in Massachusetts (Score:5, Informative)
Massachusetts would like to recieve comments about Microsoft's OfficeOpen XML specification (now Ecma 376) being proposed as an addition to their list of usable "open standards". I'm hearing that they are reading the emails and will take them seriously.
It's a proposal, and it's not yet carved in stone. Time will tell if they mean it, but with that reassurance, I have to put my cynicism on hold, at least for now, and say that if this is an issue you care about, you need to let them know how you feel in polite and informative emails before July 20th, 2007. It never hurts to try, particularly since I've no doubt Microsoft is lobbying wherever it can. When I thought it was useless, I didn't want to pretend otherwise or have you engage in make work. But if it has a chance, it's very different.
Here's the address to write to: standards at state.ma.us. (Only use the @ symbol instead of the at.)
I suspect the most important thing right now is numbers, so even a short email is helpful. They can't know how you feel unless you tell them, and they can't understand the tech unless it's presented with proofs of statements made. And remember, it's a new crew, so some of the things we explained the first time may not have been transferred to the new brains at the helm. So please let me provide you with some resources, so that if you wish some materials at hand to compose a more thoughtful and more technical email, it will save you some time.
Re:Cash is King (Score:5, Informative)
No, it's not! Even with infinite allowance for ugliness, the sewage that Microsoft is trying to foist upon everyone isn't even sufficiently complete enough to write an independent implementation with! You can't have a standard that says "do it the way $foo did it;" you have to at least actually describe how $foo did do it. Microsoft has failed to do even that!
Misunderstandings of the standards process (Score:2, Informative)
Second, in SDO's it accredits, ANSI requires balance among participants to ensure that all kinds of stakeholder viewpoints are included and no stakeholder class is dominant. It looks like ANSI let this one get away. They should also have rules against packing committees.
Re:maybe its just me (Score:3, Informative)
Intentional? No. It's merely the result of some poor sod documenting the Office formats, which are essentially dumps of the programs' internal state. What you see is merely the consequence of the fact that Office is held together with spit, bailing wire, and the curséd blood of sacrificed Microsoft H1-b programmers.
Re:Hack Back (Score:3, Informative)
They would need 20 to get a 2/3 majority vote.
You suggest that we hack back, but that is not etical.
When somebody's clubbing you on the head, first you stop the clobbering, then you worry about what to do with them. One can prefer a happy community spirit while still not subscribing to radical pacifism [wikipedia.org].
INCITS has a vote in ANSI (Score:1, Informative)
ANSI will eventually vote on whether to fast-track OOXML as an ANSI standard. It's on the fast-track because ECMA has already accepted it (i.e. it was force-fed through by Microsoft, but that's not very hard to do with the ECMA).
So what's at stake here is one vote in ANSI. And I gather that ANSI will eventually vote for or against it as an ISO standard. Or something like that. But there are so many votes, and even more push from Microsoft, that I barely have any clue where things stand now.
Re:Cash is King (Score:5, Informative)
I'm not complaining about it being hard to read, I'm talking about it literally saying things like "format the text the way Word 95 does it," which would require somebody wanting to implement the standard to reverse-engineer Word 95! The reason Microsoft is the only entity that can possibly implement the standard is because the standard is just (incomplete) documentation of how Office already works, hacks to provide a semblence of version compatibility and all.
Re:Why the push? (Score:5, Informative)
Perhaps you haven't heard, but OOXML is not anywhere near an open standard. Google: autoSpaceLikeWord95 (...how exactly do you autoSpaceLikeWord95? Decompile Word 95 on Windows 95? Where do you get these programs?), VML (is that even implementable outside of Windows and Internet Explorer? oops!), WMF (ditto), and "referenced" patents. MS is even employing Linux companies to write "translators" that can never fully implement OOXML because of these intentional problems. Just read the Halloween documents where MS says they need to innovate above standards (embrace + extend) or some Comes v MS documents. Google "Microsoft on standards". http://www.robweir.com/blog/2007/01/microsoft-on-
I'll have to say, so many people are falling for the Open Office, er, I mean Office Open XML "standard" that MS's PR firm must have been paid very well.
From the OOXML patent promise:
"Microsoft irrevocably promises not to assert any Microsoft Necessary Claims against you for making, using, selling, offering for sale, importing or distributing any implementation to the extent it conforms to a Covered Specification (Covered Implementation), subject to the following. This is a personal promise directly from Microsoft to you, and you acknowledge as a condition of benefiting from it that no Microsoft rights are received from suppliers, distributors, or otherwise in connection with this promise. If you file, maintain or voluntarily participate in a patent infringement lawsuit against a Microsoft implementation of such Covered Specification, then this personal promise does not apply with respect to any Covered Implementation of the same Covered Specification made or used by you. To clarify, Microsoft Necessary Claims are those claims of Microsoft-owned or Microsoft-controlled patents that are necessary to implement only the required portions of the Covered Specification that are described in detail and not merely referenced in such Specification. Covered Specifications are listed below.
This promise is not an assurance either (i) that any of Microsofts issued patent claims covers a Covered Implementation or are enforceable or (ii) that a Covered Implementation would not infringe patents or other intellectual property rights of any third party. No other rights except those expressly stated in this promise shall be deemed granted, waived or received by implication, exhaustion, estoppel, or otherwise."
Oh, you mean VML is only referenced and therefore not covered by the patent promise, at the same time MS is throwing their patents around Linux? Too bad it's inherently part of the OOXML spec....
Re:wha? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:So take them out. (Score:4, Informative)
Legacy document support in Microsoft OOXML is based on patent encumbered proprietary format tags. The "standard" only preserves legacy documents by keeping them in the proprietary format they were made in. And it took Microsoft 6000 pages to say, "if you want to open a Word 95 document, buy a copy of Word 95," and then in fine print, "just because there is a reference to Word 95 in our patent unencumbered, pledge protected standard doesn't mean that you can use the patent encumbered and highly proprietary Microsoft Word 95 format in any implementation other than one purchased from Microsoft, now or at any time in the future."
ODF has not ignored the issue of legacy formats, and neither has Microsoft. Microsoft wants to keep legacy formats closed and preserve the lock in mechanism you blamed on ODF. ODF objects to referencing closed, proprietary formats in standards that are supposed to be open.
Re:So take them out. (Score:3, Informative)
But that's the wrong way to do it! You don't say "do it the way Word 95 did," you actually specify how it did it and then mark it up with the appropriate tags. For example, say italics in Word 95 were tilted 20 degrees. You don't mark that up as "<Word95Italics>[foo]</Word95Italics>", you mark it up as "<italics tilt="20 degrees">[foo]</italics>"!
Besides, backwards compatibility doesn't belong in the document format, it belongs in the software that translates between the formats. It's only in OOXML because the "document format" is a glorified memory dump of the software that implements it, and are thus inseperable.