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ISO Feels OK With Corruption, Officially Approves OOXML (Updated)

I sold out



So, as we already expected and knew yesterday, ISO has just declared Microsoft's OOXML an international chaos standard, despite the fact that stories about misconduct around the world continue to flow in and numerous antitrust concerns have been raised. Let's take another quick look.

Philippines Again



Here is a coverage about the Philippines.

The Manila Bulletin Online tells us how the Philippines changed its No vote on OOXML to Yes. Once again there is an indication that when no consensus was reached, the chairman decided to make it Yes. That blatantly happened in Norway, and I can't help but want more details about the Philippines.


Remember the Philippines? We offered quite an extensive set of links about the Philippines last night. There are too many stories from there which suggest irregularities.

Croatia



For background on OOXML dirty tricks in Croatia, consider the following posts:



Some of the above were highly disturbing for they illustrated just how easily Microsoft had hijacked the entire process. On the bright side of things, Croatian has just accepted ODF as a national standard, perhaps in order to appease the outrage. It all remains to be seen because ISO for OOXML is just a first step in a much larger battle.

Today, after a four hour meeting, Croatian CSI accepted ODF as a national standard.


Poland



Back to Poland now. We covered the situation there on several occasions recently [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]. Here is an article about this story, which ought to reach wider circulation.

The events leading up to the ISO's decision on OOXML can best be described as strange.

Take the case of KT 182, the Polish technical committee responsible for the OOXML standardization process, as described on Groklaw: Chairperson Elzbieta Andrukiewicz was instructed that KT 182 should abstain from voting if a consensus was not achieved. Well, it wasn't, and she said the members who were absent could vote by e-mail E-Mail Marketing Software - Free Trial. Click Here. -- but if they didn't vote, she'd take their non-response as a yes.

Later, when presenting the results of the ballot resolution, she showed a slide that claimed 98 percent of the OOXML issues had been resolved during the KT 182 meeting.

When reminded this wasn't true, and told that the author of the PowerPoint file was Paul Pesch, platform strategy manager at Microsoft Netherlands, she threatened to sue anyone who repeated the assertion that Pesch was the author.

That slide had been shown at another meeting, and one of the Brazilian delegates had complained about it.


The list of nations listed here is of course very incomplete and partial. We have seen literally dozens of nations where various levels of abuse were well documented. This includes large and seemingly credible nations such as the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, India and France.

OOXML Not for GNU/Linux Users



The incompatibility with respect to the GNU GPL remains, despite the many repeated lies from Microsoft, which sought to deny this by escaping the question at hand. Even the Microsoft press bothered to mention this problem, albeit 'second hand'.

Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, says Microsoft simply fails to go far enough to indemnify developers who hope to write software based on Microsoft's opened intellectual property (IP). He complains that protections often exist only for what Microsoft terms "non-commercial developers."

"Unless it addresses the entire supply chain, it doesn't make a lot of difference," Zemlin says, arguing that ill-defined boundaries of legal protection under the Microsoft scheme may expose open source developers to threat of litigation.

"Think of it like ant poison. People who are non-commercial developers think, 'I'm safe.' They then integrate a patented protocol into the upstream code they're working on. Then that code somehow gets into the downstream," Zemlin explains. "Well, that's like taking poison back into the [nest]. What happens is, inadvertently, an open source developer brings insecticide with a patent license requirement into an open source project."


And that's just how one gets a whole platform approved as an international standard. It's sad to see ISO entering this vortex of global corruption, which makes it part of the problem rather than the solution it strives to deliver (uniformity, competition).

"Since when has the world of computer software design been about what people want? This is a simple question of evolution. The day is quickly coming when every knee will bow down to a silicon fist, and you will all beg your binary gods for mercy."

--Bill Gates



Update adds more information about the Philippines. Gist below:

The general pattern, like Malaysia, is the same: Government agencies and Academia reject OOXML as an ISO standard. These represent the vast majority of its citizens' interests. Just what percentage of the population do the "pro-OOXML" Associations represent?


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