Denmark Becomes Fourth Nation To Protest OOXML

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "The rumors of a fourth OOXML complaint turned out to be true. Denmark has become the fourth nation to protest the ISO's acceptance of OOXML, and Groklaw has a translation of their complaint. They now join India, Brazil, and South Africa. There are going to be plenty of questions about deadlines, because people have been given two different deadlines for appeals, and the final DIS of OOXML was late in being distributed and not widely available. In fact, that seems to be one of Denmark's complaints, along with missing XML schemas, contradictory wording, lack of interoperability, and troubles with the maintenance of DIS29500. In other words, we should expect a lot of wrangling over untested rules from here on out, and Microsoft knows how to deal with that."

Farewell ISO

Will noone step up and defend the credibility and proud history of ISO here? They have done good work in the past. Cannot someone defend the way they've handled this?

No?

Anybody? Anybody at all?

I thought not.

Reputation. 60 years to build and 6 months to burn down.

Goodbye ISO.

Re:Farewell ISO

"Goodbye ISO."

From a more optimistic slant:

ISO is being forced to address certain issues for the first time, and the outcome could be a more robust and impartial standardization process.

I'm not predicting a better future for ISO, just refusing to believe that all is lost.

Re:Farewell ISO

ISO is being forced to address certain issues for the first time, and the outcome could be a more robust and impartial standardization process. I'm not predicting a better future for ISO, just refusing to believe that all is lost.

Show me one admission that the ISO even realise that this is an abomination of a process. SC34 are overrun with Microsoft zealots like Rick Jelliffe and they blame the world for noticing what a poor job they've done.

They need to admit fault if they want to be trusted again. As of yet there is nothing from the ISO that would inspire confidence.

Mod parent up!

Until ISO PUBLICLY admits the SPECIFIC mistakes made AND takes action against the people who committed those mistakes, there is no reason to believe that ISO will do anything differently in the future.

ISO sold out. That's all there is to it.

Re:Mod parent up!

Sadly, I fear you are correct. However, there is another consideration. There ARE other standards bodies, and standards bodies are no different from commodities or currencies - once they are devalued, nobody wants to buy in. A standards body is only a tradable commodity whilst people are still buying in, same as with the dollar or the zlotty. If one of the other bodies were to become politically attractive to enough countries and enough businesses, the ISO currency collapses.

It doesn't matter if it's not a total collapse, it just has to scare ISO. Scare them badly. So badly they stop messing around and pocketing back-handers, but go straight for a bit.

Re:Farewell ISO

From a more optimistic slant:

ISO is being forced to address certain issues for the first time, and the outcome could be a more robust and impartial standardization process.

ISO has already blown it @ the State level.
Their rules were not setup to deal with an actively aggressive entity like Microsoft.

Maybe things will get fixed at the National level, but the organization as a whole has been tainted by the abuses visited upon the individual member States. The only way they can regain their credibility is for each country to implement robust rule changes.

ISO doesn't just certify software.
Maybe the next poorly conceived ISO spec to get railroaded through will have real world safety implications.

Real World Safety Implications

Increasingly, this notion that what we geeks are hot and bothered about is "just software, after all" is going to be questioned.

Many thousands of annual deaths are attributable to harmful drug interactions, and a lot of these result from the unavailability of standard Electronic Medical Records(EMR) across care providers.

That's right, vendor lock-in and nonstandard documents are killing people.

The (open) standardization of general-purpose office documents should have been completed a decade ago. EMRs should have been standardized 5 years ago. Many people have died unnecessarily.

Inflammatory Windows Nuclear Plant Worm

I have to wonder if you have any idea how ridiculous that sounds: a document that (and we're speculating even here, but I'll give it to you for the moment) can maybe only be opened correctly with Office is equivalent to (for example) certifying a standard for nuclear plant safety that could kill millions of people.

I'm not trying to be inflammatory, but seriously, listen to yourself for a minute.

Oh, FSM preserve us!

You're not referring to one of the Windows ONLY worms that crashed multiple nuclear plants [securityfocus.com] are you? You have to be some anti-Microsoft troll to be bringing that (2003) ancient history up again.

Dude, if you're a Microsoft astroturfer you should make sure you pick up your personal effects on the way out today.

ISO 9000

As a wiser poster than me observed some time ago, that ISO failed to have management processes in place a year in advance of predictable environment changes is evidence they fail even at following their own standards.

That they've let this issue go so long past its natural conclusion - laughing at a proposal to fast-track a 6000 page un-implemented proprietary standard - is evidence they are themselves compromised by agents of an external entity.

If they abort this atrocity all is not yet well. Until they dig out and expel every agent that perverted their mission and monitor for some time that their processes do now work, they will remain suspect.

If they fail to do the right thing, well, they're done. Stick a fork in them. The nations of the world would prefer to return to the bad old days of setting their own standards and negotiating equivalence by treaty. They will not stand for having their standards dictated to them by a US corporation, even through a puppet ISO.

Re:Farewell ISO

ISO has been playing games like this with SC29/WG11 for years.

SC29/WG11 (More commonly known as MPEG) is notoriously closed off. All their proposed work for consideration is closed off from public scrutiny until after it has been accepted and published. Reference software updates are only made available to committee members while the rest of us have to wait for a version to be signed off as a Corrigendum/Addendum and then sit for a year as all the i's are dotted and t's are crossed in the general body (why can't non controversial reference software bugfixes get fast-tracked the same way OOXML was?). When people come to MPEG industry forum technical list (Mp4-tech) for clarification they are often referred secret documents and reference software that they have no way of getting. Furthermore their document interchange format is .doc not ODF or OOXML.

Where did this "credibility and proud history of ISO" meme come from?

Re:Farewell ISO

No, no I don't find that at all. What I do find though is that if you look around, the only people who actually care about this whole thing is the open source folks trying to force governments to legislate Office out of existence

Oh, right. So the national standards bodies of four separate nations are composed entirely of Free Software zealots, and the way we can tell is that they're complaining about the perversion oft he ISO fast track process. So that wouldn't be circular logic, because...?

Groklaw and it's regulars still insist that "conveyancing" in GPLv3 is actually enforceable. You have to be all kinds of useless at law to believe that.

Ah, so they're useless at law because they don't hold with your favourite untested legal theory. Does the phrase "confirmation bias" mean anything to you?

While we're on, show me where PJ said this, please. It's most unlike her to state anything as legally enforceable - she tends to quote the relevant legislation and then say how she thinks it might be applied.

You may say, just "don't read OOXML stories" and "don't read Microsoft stories" but here at Slashdot that's all there fucking is.

Well, the obvious thing there is don't read Slashdot if the choice of stories offends you so much. All the same, I'd like to test this particular assertion against the current front page.

Bye Bye Bananas [slashdot.org]

Ah, yes. Microsoft have announced plans to discontinue support for the popular Banana protocol and announced that all post Vista versions of the OS will only us MS-Kumquat. All that stuff about spreading fungus is clearly FUD spread by astroturfers and MS fanboys in the media. How could I have been so blind?

An Imaginative Use For CCTVs [slashdot.org]

The point that's not immediately apparent here is that The Get Out Clause were in fact singing songs with pro MSOOXML lyrics. Whoever would have thunk it?

China's All Seeing Eye [slashdot.org]

Now this one actually mentions Microsoft in TFA. Admittedly it's only one sentence, but that alone should be enough to make the entire articel about Microsoft.

After that, we get this discussion, which obviously is about MSOOXML, then according to my prefs, it's "Seven Failed Foot-Based Game Controllers" and "A Home Lab/Shop For Kids?" I don't think I need to take this one any further.

And by the way, I have no idea what moderation to expect on this one. Probably funny though. It amused me, at least.

What can I say? You made me laugh.

Re:Farewell ISO

Will noone step up and defend the credibility and proud history of ISO here? They have done good work in the past. Cannot someone defend the way they've handled this?

No?

I don't understand this "blame the victim" mentality that's pervasive in Slashdot discussions on this.

Microsoft deliberately subverted ECMA, a number of national standards bodies as well as ISO itself. The influence they brought to bear was unprecedented, and ISO simply was not designed to deal with it. The fast track process was abused to prevent a reasonable response, and the short deadlines are being used to the same effect in this protest phase.

It was a deliberate, calculated attack on an unprepared target.

And ISO is not alone - look at all the governments and departments MS has bought or influenced over the years.

Whether ISO can recover from this is questionable now. Responding correctly will be hard because the committees are still stacked with Microsoft reps. They're like a rooted box - untrustworthy without some extensive malware cleaning.

If this is evidence for anything, it's that Microsoft is out of control and must be split up.

Re:I value your opinion

Now the world needs to be looking at clipping the wings of the predator that did the damage, not at sinking the boot into a crippled ISO.

I love the "crippled ISO" image. It almost suggests that if we just shout at Microsoft and stop saying hurtful things about ISO, why then the organisation will get a chance to heal, and recover its ethical values, and be a force for good in the world once more.

Sadly, I don't think things work like that.

While I agree about Microsoft, I don't think we can really absolve ISO from all blame. To do that would be to send a message to the ISO saying "it's OK to be corrupt. No one minds. Break the rules, stack the deck; they'll just blame the organisation sponsoring the standard. Get your noses in the trough, boys!"

I agree that the fall of ISO is a tragedy. But until and unless they set their house in order I don't see how anyone is going to trust them again. Effectively they've just hung out a shingle saying "For Rent".

At the very least, ISO need to admit that there's a problem here and take steps to both fix the damage done, and to ensure it doesn't happen again. And that's not going to happen if they feedback they get "well, I guess that could have happened to anyone".

Re:Farewell ISO

Cannot someone defend the way they've handled this? No? Anybody? Anybody at all?I thought not.

On slashdot? Not without an asbestous suit. Look at it from ISOs point of view - they had a lot of large companies voting for OOXML. Stuffed or not, many national bodies voted yes. What do you expect, an ISO tzar sitting on top to say "We'll take your votes under advicement, but we'll do whatever the f... we like and reject it anyway"? Like in a court, almost no matter how badly the case was botched it's the parties that has to appeal, not the judge. That's what happening now, and the appeals process can get all the dirty laundry and breach of process out in the open.

Reputation. 60 years to build and 6 months to burn down. Goodbye ISO.

Yeah sure, an organization that makes thousands of standards is going to burn down over one mishandled one. I wonder if you'd like to try that standard on anything else, for example Congress. If we burned them down every time the process was subverted by riders or they passed unconstitutional laws or just did things that in retrospect were considered horrible, horrible screwups we wouldn't have time to rebuild before we'd have to burn them again. Go easy on the hyperbole, the world is not about to end. If all appeals fail and OOXML is finally approved, there will still be a reckoning in ten years or so that this was a mistake. Having standards is too important though, burn down ISO and you'll have even more paid shills like ECMA take their place.

Re:Farewell ISO

I'm a technical assessor and signatory approver for a real ISO Standard - ISO-17025 (General requirements for the competence of testing and calibration laboratories). This was formerly ISO 25, one of the first international standards, which goes back nearly 60 years.

A number of people have mentioned to me that they consider that Microsoft have 'played' the ISO process and, as a result, consider that even 'good' standards have been compromised. I believe that they are right, and that ISO need to consider getting their house in order. ISO 17025 is a standard that can allow for testing on materials to be carried out in one country, and then these materials can then be exported and distributed within other countries without further testing. In the past there has been disquiet that laboratories in 'Less economically developed' countries, were either not capable of carrying out the technological requirements of some tests; or that they were more liable to a corruption of process. By hard work, and negotiation over a number of years, this disquiet has been addressed.

As a result of the OXML debacle, we may now be in a position where a LEDC can now truthfully say "Why pick on us - ISO is corrupt anyway".

Re:Farewell ISO

None of which matters. Businesses don't care what format they use as long as they can pass it back and forth and it just works. That isn't going to change anytime soon.

Businesses care because of what is happening now, with Office 2007 Microsoft is changing the format in a major way. It isn't decided by market forces, its decided by Microsoft, their customers have no say. Why the change? Microsoft gives various reasons, some may even be valid, but the big one is Microsoft wants to force an upgrade to improve their revenue stream. Companies don't like it that they can be forced by their supplier to replace their stock of a product for no reason but to improve the suppliers bottom line. If they can break free to a true standard then no one vendor can control when and if those businesses upgrade.

Businesses and governments have a massive archive of old data in the older DOC formats. Only Microsoft can provide the tools to convert them. This conversion is going to cost those governments and bushinesses a fortune and that expenditure is not dictated by their desires but by Microsoft. They are now beginning to realize that this can happen any time Microsoft wishes to dictate it. Naturally they don't wish to be forced to spend vast quantities of money whenever it is convenient to Microsoft. With a real standard no one company can force such a conversion. No one company will be the sole provider of the tools to do the conversion. No one company can hold your data hostage by their control of the format.

Governments and businesses are slowly coming to understand that right now they no longer control their data, Microsoft does. As that realization sinks in they begin to look for ways to take back control. A true standard helps to take back that control.

Right now in recessionary times when governments and businesses want to conserve money is when Microsoft is seeing a need to force an upgrade and compel those governments and businesses to spend, just when they can least afford to. Also due to the timing of the EU vs Microsoft antitrust cases the eyes of the world are on Microsoft and people are being shown how Microsoft's behaviour is bad for governments and businesses.

Companies that wish to compete for the Office software market have for sometime been educating companies and governments about these issue and slowly they are winning. Self interest is driving those companies to make the educational effort. Self interest is what makes the customers begin to care about standards. Self interest is why Microsoft has to fight so hard to continue their control of the Office market.

Overheard in Helsingør [aka Elsinore]...

Prince of Denmark: To be or not to be. -- Not to be.

[presses remote button and explosion rips through ISO headquarters in Geneva]

No, Denmark has not protested.

No: Denmark has not protested formally. Denmark is represented in ISO by Dansk Standard [en.ds.dk] which, as you may recall, somewhat controversially changed its vote to "Yes".

This is a protest letter from Foreningen af Open Source Leverandører [osl.dk] a vendor's association (literally: "The Association of Open Source Vendors", their official English title seems to be "The Danish Open Source Business Association"). They happened to be part of the technical committee (as I understand it, I may be wrong) in Denmark, but are not formal representatives of Dansk Standard.

The recipient of the letter, Jacob Holmblad, is the managing director of Dansk Standard, who also happens to be vice-president of technical management at ISO.

While an interesting complaint, which raises a number of pertinent issues, this is not a formal complaint from a national standards body as those from South Africa, Brazil, and India.

Re:No, Denmark has not protested.

FYI, I think the correct wording is that Denmark hasn't yet appealed formally. The summary is misleading with the whole talk about appeals, but this letter itself doesn't seem to be an appeal.

However, this quote from TFA suggests that Denmark is still intending to appeal:
"'Jacob Holmblad [the recipient of the letter, and ISO Vice President, and managing director of Danish Standard] will appeal directly, because he has one foot in each camp,' explains Morten Kjærsgaard to Computerworld."

OK.....

So the hierarchy of countries where there is a real informed segment of the populace or government now starts with Denmark, South Africa, India and Brazil?!?

Refresh my memory, do those countries waterboard people? Do they use rigged machines to count votes? What is the matter with those people?!?

Pinko commies the lot of 'em, allowing true interoperable anti monopoly standards and actually counting votes. They better not be brown, or we'll bomb the shit out of 'em!

Re:zzz

Is anybody else tired of reading OOXML articles every other day?

I call BS. You are obviously a MS troll because no one not even MS Office can read OOXML--oh you mean reading articles about OOXML? In that case, I agree with you. We do not welcome the OOXML-reading overlords. :P

Re:zzz

This has been debunked so many times. To reiterate;

1. This discussion is about ODF, not Open Office. OOo is only one of many suites and applications supporting ODF.

2. More spin.

   This statement is misleading. Every file written by OpenOffice.org, KOffice or IBM Symmphony (to use common examples) is ODF compliant. The file may not require every tag in the full specification to describe the contents each application is capable of writing, but it will comply with the standard. In other words, each application is fully compliant with the subset of the standard mandated by the application's content creation role.

   By contrast, MS Office does NOT write compliant OOXML files at all

Re:Pardon my ignorance, but...

"... what ramifications does ISO's decision actually have?"

A brief summary:

Storing data in an open document format will ensure the accessibility of that data moving forward, regardless of software vendor, changes in the software ecosystem, etc... because anyone will be able to implement their own version of the standard for retrieving the stored data should that become necessary.

With this in mind, governments and institutions around the world are looking at ways they can ensure the accessibility of their documents unconditionally moving into the future. The impact of these new open document format policies will be huge on software purchasing decisions, as any software package used to generate, modify, or read documents will need to comply with the open document format.

Enter MS and OOXML, a document standard that has now been validated by and internationally accepted ISO review procedure.

There are questions about the way the standard was written, whether it can actually be implemented, whether any implementation would require dependence on proprietary MS technology, and whether the dominant MS products would adhere to the strict letter of the standard or break compatibility with non-MS implementations as has happened in other instances with MS implementations.

Finally, there are questions about whether bribery and other underhanded tactics were used to secure a fast track process and passing vote through the ISO process.

If OOXML is allowed to stand there are concerns that MS will effectively achieve lock-in with the governments that opt for OOXML technology, because access to data stored in OOXML documents will remain dependent on MS.

Re:Pardon my ignorance, but...

Beaten by another, but I wrote a reply so I'm posting it anyway.

The main thing seems to be that lots of government bodies are putting in place (or have already put in place) legislation requiring all government documents use a format that complies to an "open standard". Requiring this for internal documents is less common, but it is common for anything published for public access. The idea being to ensure every citizen is able to access the information the government produces without having to buy products from a specific vendor, for example.

From a technical point of view what ISO does matters not at all. Microsoft are going to continue to develop the format to suit their needs, and any long-term compatibility with whatever ends up being in the "OOXML ISO specification" will be purely coincidental, as they've already stated. Government departments will continue using whatever software they feel like using, and will make a half-hearted attempt to conform to whatever rules they have to, just like they always have.

If .docx and friends get the magic ISO Standard Tick then government departments can simply slap their .docx files on a website and be in compliance with the legislation regarding making their publications publically accessible without vendor bias: it's not their fault that there's only one working implementation of the "standard". Now they could theoretically mount legal action against Microsoft for selling them a product which they claim supports the OOXML ISO standard but doesn't really, but that's unlikely since everybody knows the whole thing is a sham and they're just playing along to cover their asses.

On the other hand, if .docx and friends don't get the magic tick, then the government departments will have to publish their files in something other than {.doc,.docx}. If the chosen format was ODF (.odt etc) then people will need software that can open it. This means a) the government will be pointing people to alternatives to MS Office, and b) Microsoft will "have to" natively support opening .odt files within Office; otherwise they risk losing customers -- particularly the ones that buy Office because that's "what you use to write documents". Also the government departments will need a way to export to the "standard" format, and if Office can't do it natively some may decide to switch software to save that step.

Consider that currently, even if you use OpenOffice or KOffice or Abiword or anything else, you probably send documents to other people using .doc unless you specifically know they don't use Office. The reason is simply that, even if they do use something else, they can probably import the .doc file without problems. However if they do use Office, they're completely unable to import most other document formats.

So, the hoped-for end result is that Microsoft will effectively be forced to make Office interoperate with other software, rather than having everyone else trying to implement Microsoft's format. While the documentation for .docx will no doubt be useful in figuring out some corner cases, it's not a significant improvement over the reverse engineered re-implementations of the format currently being used.

That's the theory, anyway. I doubt it will have an earth-shattering affect either way, but I suppose it's another straw on the camel's back.

Re:Congratulations

Other than for embedded devices, C is pretty much dead -- and even a lot of that work is in C++ today.

Question for the class: what languages are C++ compilers, Windows and Linux written in? Since we're talking about OOXML and ODF, what language is Microsoft's own ODF to OOXML translator [sourceforge.net] written in? That may be a .cpp file, but the vast majority of that code is C.

You've declued yourself. I'm sorry. Do you want to try again, perhaps on topic this time? You're killing your Karma dude.