Sweden's Vote on OOXML Invalidated 232
Groklaw Reader writes "Just days after Microsoft's attempt to buy the Swedish vote on OOXML came to light, SIS declared its own vote invalid. The post at Groklaw references a ComputerWorld article with revelations from Microsoft: 'Microsoft Corp. admitted Wednesday that an employee at its Swedish subsidiary offered monetary compensation to partners for voting in favor of the Office Open XML document format's approval as an ISO standard. Microsoft said the offer, when discovered, was quickly retracted and that its Sweden managers voluntarily notified the SIS, the national standards body. "We had a situation where an employee sent a communication via e-mail that was inconsistent with our corporate policy," said Tom Robertson, general manager for interoperability and standards at Microsoft. "That communication had no impact on the final vote." ...'"
No impact... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:of course... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:In other words (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I really hope this is final... (Score:1, Insightful)
What's Inconsistent (Score:5, Insightful)
What's inconsistent with Microsoft's policy is getting caught doing this.
Re:SIS press release translated (Score:5, Insightful)
It has *seriously* damaged *Sweden's* reputation (Score:4, Insightful)
The organisation has instantly lost all credibility.
Microsoft still wins. (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft failed in it's attempt to buy a 'YES' vote from Sweden.
Microsoft successfully used it's money to turn Sweden's 'NO' vote into an 'ABSTAIN' vote.
Miles
How can they call this a standard? (Score:5, Insightful)
What's more alarming to me is that there is simply no way that OOXML is a rational standard, the voters clearly are not expert at it, nobody is backing it with an alternative implementation. I don't even believe an alternative implementation is really possible at this point, it's just not clear to me. Can you imagine how the internet wouldn't even exist if IETF standards were approached this way? It is very clear to me that the folks voting on this standard have not read it, it's 7000 pages, there simply isn't a way that they did. I don't want to out right just bash MS but they came late to the game and they simply have no track record of pushing for open standards, it's almost against their very nature. To ramrod this though will ultimately just undermine what it means for something to be "standard" and standards committee members should be aware of that, this won't make OOXML the standard so much as it will undermine the very concept of a standard for this technology. The fact that nobody on the committee is putting the brakes on to me indicates just how broken this comittee is and that the standard should be either dropped or restarted. If they aren't taking is seriously, then let's just kill the standard, I'd rather have none than a bullshit one.
Open document formats is something that is fairly important. I bet you'd have trouble dealing with a lot of common document formats from just 15 years ago. Anyone process Wordperfect 4.2 and 5 files? How about Wordstar? Multimate anyone? Sure you can probably find a way to important them and make them usable but what about in another 5 years? As we digitize more documents, right now, we're almost making sure that in 100 years this will be a dark spot in history because they won't be able to process what records may exist, if they can get them off of the media (if the media is even good) It's good for mankind to produce some well defined, open and sane standards, it's also pretty good for business, how many formats does Office currently try to support? How much does that cost? Imagine if Office 2015 only supported like 3. I don't know what kinds of numbers MS spends on it, I'm guessing millions of dollars a year just on supporting Office file formats though and I couldn't imagine it really impacting the use of Office, it's a fine piece of software. I really don't even care if it's properly documented OOXML instead of the OASIS/OO.org XML format, it just needs to be properly documented and that documentation needs to be vetted before a vote happens. Maybe that's what MS really wants but these committee members are representing corporate interests as well as national ones in some cases and I can't possibly see how they can justify the job they are doing. No standard is better than a really fucked up one.
Re:No impact... (Score:5, Insightful)
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0781359.html [infoplease.com]
Re:It has *seriously* damaged *Sweden's* reputatio (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I used to process WordPerfect files... (Score:4, Insightful)
You sure about that? (Score:5, Insightful)
Meanwhile, something like 40 countries have just decided that they want "P" status in the ISO (i.e. to be able to vote). Most, if not all, of them have gotten stuffed to the gills with Microsoft Partners who joined recently.
So it's not just Sweden, and it remains to be seen whether these other countries will be able to do anything in time, or whether the ISO will get turned into a Microsoft puppet. Now *there* is a scary thought. No further standards without Microsoft's blessing? Ouch! I don't think they'll give up on the power they're gaining from this any time soon, not given how much money it must've cost to run a global campaign like this.
Re:How can they call this a standard? (Score:5, Insightful)
Nobody is backing it with ANY implementation. Stéphane Rodriguez documented several non-trivial ways that MS Office fails to conform to OOXML. The purpose for MS is to waive their ISO standard around when government organizations try to insist on open standard file formats in procurement policy. The whole thing is disgusting. This may be the lowest I've ever seen MS stoop.
nobody is backing it with an alternative implementation
The sad thing here is that MS is succeeding at showing that the credibility of the standards creation process is defective. Simply put, there aren't any standards for standards.
Re:No impact... (Score:3, Insightful)
Whether you can convince enough people that this is a higher goal or of personal interest to just them is a different matter. I doubt it, myself. It's just as gratifying to have an inferior standard "win" and used by the unwashed masses, so one can keep feeling superior.
Re:You sure about that? (Score:5, Insightful)
Once, Microsoft had an unchallenged monopoly on the desktop. They didn't have to bother with standards; standards didn't matter, since Microsoft could basically unilaterally decide what actually was used in IT. "ISO shmISO", as they might say in these parts.
Then, something strange happened - some governments decided they cared about standards after all, and things like ODF looked like they might get a foothold. Therefore Microsoft started to 'standardize' their offerings:
The first step for Microsoft is to get its products stamped as 'standards'. The next is to prevent competing projects from getting stamped as such. I expect to see, within a decade or so, that Microsoft products all carry ISO and ECMA logos, while Linux, OpenOffice, etc. will get derided by media shills as "those products that don't implement important international standards like OOXML, MicrosoftHTML, MicrOSoftIX, MS-DB" and other things I can't imagine right now, but I am sure Microsoft strategists will.
Re:No impact... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:It seems to be the logical step (Score:1, Insightful)
Different voting procedures matter (Score:3, Insightful)
On a national scale, it depends on each country how they decided to do the voting process: from "there are not enough chairs in this room so you must stay outside" via "my wife is a lawyer and she says it's safe" to "sure you can come in on the last week, pay, and get to vote without us vetting whether you've even read the standard". It's almost as if national bureau members are real people who don't know how to react when a violent drunk suddenly shows up at the birthday party and starts pissing in the bowl of crisps :-)
I am not at all involved in any of this, but I'd be very angry if: I was a legit member of such a committee, wrestled through the 6000 pages for 5 months, carefully writing down my comments, and then it's all invalidated because Microsoft votes "yes", vetoing the other 5? members vote "no with comments", so according to dutch rules it's a "we're not in consensus so we'll have to officially shut up about it and tell ISO that we the dutch don't have anything to say about document production standards":
I couldn't find *ANYTHING* about it at first on www.nen.nl which is odd.. however just now I found a press release saying in extremely neutral terms that no consensus could be reached: Nederlandse standpunt bepaald over ratificatie norm 'Office Open XML file formats' [www2.nen.nl]On the other hand, there's a press release from one of the parties (who presumably voted "no with comments" because all parties except Microsoft did): isoc.nl statement [isoc.nl] which paints a much more negative picture.
I think the outcome "abstain without comments" is ridiculous for a highly industrialized country with a corresponding large production of documents. We don't want an immature document standard, thank you very much. We have a working standard already. Just use ODF, and if it needs to be expanded (e.g. to incorporate elements of Chinese UOF), then fine.