From the Campaign for Document Freedom
Our previous two posts on this subject were critical of ISO [1, 2]. We did, however, try to emphasise that head changes led to ISO getting captured by Microsoft. Essentially, Microsoft destroyed ISO from the inside over the past year or so (there are similar examples). Those who fought against it seem to have left and those who remained or were appointed (e.g. the Microsoft-friendly Alex Brown [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21]) turned ISO into a 'Microsoft shop'.
ISO members failed to disapprove the Open XML format. Microsoft has compromised the International Standards Organisation (ISO) during the rush to get a stamp for their Office OpenXML (OOXML), using unfair practices such as committee stuffing in several countries and political interventions of ministers in the standardization process.
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Pieter Hintjens, of the European Software Market Association, says:"Nobody wants standards you can buy. Microsoft bought a standard at ECMA, now they bought ISO. Who wants this?"
Thus, managers of the major IT governmental organizations in Brazil, Venezuela and South Africa wrote and co-signed an open letter to ISO, to express their dissatisfaction with the final result of this all.
The letter was also signed by managers of similar entities in Ecuador, Paraguay and Cuba, in a clear signal that this affected more people than I imagined.
Reading the text of the letter, I’ll not summarize anything here because it is worth be read in full, I reminded of Newton’s third law: “For every action there is an equal, but opposite, reaction.”
The OOXML fast-track process and subsequent approval vote in the ISO was riddled with complaints that Microsoft acted unscrupulously, the standards process was not implemented properly and the specification approved was too unwieldy to implement. As a result, the national bodies of Brazil, India, South Africa and Venezuela filed protests.
From the Campaign for Document Freedom