Summary: With the ending of the i4i case OOXML should be removed from ISO and cease to be used

THIS is a subject that we wrote about before, right after it turned out that Microsoft had deliberately lied by saying that OOXML had no patent issues. Microsoft was already struggling against i4i in court [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11], knowing damn well the implications it would probably have when it comes to OOXML. Microsoft lied with pride. Microsoft also corrupted ISO with the help of insiders -- "accomplices" as one might label them.

Sun's Tim Bray has just said what many came to witness a few months back.

At the time of the huge OOXML dogfight, one of the reasons Microsoft claimed that the world needed OOXML, even though there was already a perfectly-good ISO-standard XML office-document format, was that it enabled this wonderful customization feature.

What Bray calls the "OOXML dogfight" was a phenomenal display of disregard for the law (see the OOXML Abuse Index), in which the BRM convenor, Alex Brown, personally participated [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]. Over at Groklaw, Pamela Jones writes: "I wonder how Alex Brown and the gang will handle OOXML now that Microsoft has been found guilty of willful patent infringement in the i4i case and so must remove functionality from XML in its Word products? Does it mean that the standard is no longer "in use"? That it must be withdrawn due to a patent having been asserted against it?"

ISO is probably too corrupt and vain to withdraw OOXML, but that's what it ought to be doing at this stage. Microsoft rammed something ridiculous under false pretenses, not just with bribery.

Speaking of patents, here is interesting news:

A recent Microsoft patent application applies a similar approach to defining navigational queries. The inventors of the patent filing tell us that queries can be generally classified as falling into a couple of broad categories: discovery queries and navigational queries.

More here:

He compares the Microsoft filing to a recent Yahoo patent filing that details what the Sunnyvale, Calif., company might look for when deciding whether a query was navigational or not. Slawski bases some of his analysis on Microsoft's "best match" feature.

We previously wrote about the possibility that Microsoft would use patents against Google. ⬆

"The ISO process, brutal and corrupt as it was, has been covered to death by everyone."

--Tim Bray