Bonum Certa Men Certa

Expect Microsoft to be Harshly Slapped for Abuses of ISO

"If you flee the rules, you will be caught. And it will cost you dearly,"

--Neelie Kroes (about Microsoft), February 27th, 2008



Bob Sutor found an important bit of text in the MarketWatch article about Microsoft's latest fine.

In addition, Microsoft recently acknowledged that the commission is also looking into lobbying efforts for its Open XML file format, which has been derided by critics as insufficiently accessible. Microsoft unsuccessfully sought last year to receive approval from the International Organization for Standardization, or ISO, to have Open XML declared an international standard.


As you are probably aware by now, the Commission is onto Microsoft's tail as it digests and analyses the endless abuses by Microsoft in pursuit of OOXML as a standard. From Google's text search alone, this site receives over 10,000 visits a month ('OOXML' being a common search term), so it's natural to assume people do their research on this issue and end up in here. Any comment and insight you can add will probably assist tremendously and be very visible.

Going 'back' to the BRM (present days), LinuxWorld has an article about the secretive nature of a process deciding on open standards, which affect everyone (to give another example of secretive discussions, consider eastern Europe).

Delegates at the meeting must decide to accept each of ECMA's recommendations, reject them or make some other change instead.


What if the delegates wish to raise and discuss new problems? The rules forbid this. To make matters worse, the experts had very limited time to review 6,000+ pages, so not many complaints, corrections and suggestions could be made. This hopefully gives you an idea of how pointless this BRM actually is [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]. It's a shotgun wedding. China complained about this, but got pretty much ignored by ECMA (Microsoft).

Looking more closely at the article from LinuxWorld, someone spots the following:

Robbery at the BRM?



LinuxWorld mentions that the BRM organisors are making a paper ballot on all the 900 comments. It seems that the BRM organisors are "robbing national delegations of the opportunity to propose their own modifications".

[...]

The purpose of this robbery might be to avoid any fix to the standard. MS-ECMA have not proposed any changes, and this robbery is designed to get the message that the BRM have fixed some issues.


Tim Bray has some photos from the BRM in his blog, in case you are curious. It doesn't seem too rosy, but as the article above puts it, no chair are flying and people do not shout.

OOXML is bad

Recent Techrights' Posts

BASIC Predates Microsoft by Over a Decade, Microsoft-Controlled Sites Like The Register MS Don't Want You to Know This
The state of the media is really bad when it relies a lot on oligarchs' money and is appointing editors who are working for oligarchs
Brian Kernighan, "Only Third to Dennis Richie and Ken Thompson" (UNIX), Agreed With Someone Who Said Rust Was Just Hype, Should Not Replace C
17 hours ago
Reminder: Microsoft's "Secure Boot" Certificate for "Linux" Will be Expired in One Week
Many PCs won't manage to 'rotate' to another certificate
 
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, September 05, 2025
IRC logs for Friday, September 05, 2025
Genini Links 05/09/2025: Community, ROOPHLOCH, and PITkit
Links for the day
Links 05/09/2025: Vaccine Sceptics Poison the Well, Two Exploited Vulnerabilities Patched in Android
Links for the day
Gemini Links 05/09/2025: Logitech Lift and DIY Gemini Servers
Links for the day
Links 05/09/2025: Sainsbury's Caught Spying on In-Store Shoppers and Microsoft "OpenAI is Using Legal Threats to Harass its Critics"
Links for the day
Analogies for "Memory Safety" in Rust
Don't worry, it's Rust! It can do anything!
"Many of the Red Hat Employees Are Still Looking for Work"
Shame on IBM's CEO
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, September 04, 2025
IRC logs for Thursday, September 04, 2025
Microsoft Started With Code Literally From The Trash, Nothing Has Improved Since
The reality is, there are systems and code that are reliable. But they're not Microsoft's.
Hypothesis That New McKinsey/Microsoft Executive Inside Red Hat Will Outsource Research and Development Operations to India (Like They Do in IBM)
IBM is floundering
Slopwatch: Scams, Fake Articles About "Linux", Plagiarism, and Worse
Perhaps some time soon the LLMs or the "Big LLMs" will run out of money (to borrow) and go offline, leaving those slopfarms in a tough place
Gemini Links 04/09/2025: Means of Production and Rusting Out
Links for the day
Links 04/09/2025: Science, Hardware, and Eyes on China
Links for the day
Gemini Links 04/09/2025: Digital Minimalism and Social Control Media
Links for the day
IBM's GNU/Linux Divestment, Based on Hard But Anecdotal Evidence (IBM Fails to Recognise How Much Money It Made and Can Still Make From "Linux")
Love us or hate us, a lot of what we've been saying about Red Hat under IBM turns out to be rather accurate
Links 04/09/2025: Massive Microsoft Staff Cuts (Barely Reported), "Strange Conspiracy Theory Is Reportedly Spreading Inside OpenAI"
Links for the day
Activists Can Win, But Keep an Eye on the Ball and on the Trophy
GitHub is dying, it was a loss-making trap, not free hosting
Gemini Links 04/09/2025: Katrina Remembered, Distracted Driving, and Virtual Economics
Links for the day
At This Point It's No Longer Matthew Garrett But People Who Fund Matthew Garrett (or Companies That Fund His SLAPPs Against My Wife and I)
The only thing worse than misogynists are misogynists who fail to respect other people's right to go on holiday
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, September 03, 2025
IRC logs for Wednesday, September 03, 2025
The UEFI 9/11 - Part VI - This Serious Harm Was Planned for Over a Decade, Not an Accident or Merely Some Misfortune
The term "Serious Harm" is legally meaningful here
GNOME Unfit for Diversity and Inclusion
GNOME's leadership is using "bad words"
Brodie Robertson Addressing the Recently-Discovered Comments
Most people probably knew nothing about this until he wrote a response
Red Hat QA Team "Had Shrunk by Half Over the Past Year." (After IBM Divestment)
If Red Hat's workforce is being moved to the East, then RHEL can become a national security problem
Slopwatch: "Open Source" and "Linux" News Faked, Made by Bots and Entered Into Google News
Spam combined with slop about "Linux" has entered Google News