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Computer Weekly Writes About “Susceptibility of That [OOXML] Process to Corruption”

"The Norwegian [OOXML] affair was a scandal and we are still pursuing it. We haven’t given up hope of changing the vote back to No, and we hope people who experienced similar travesties in other countries will do the same."

--Steve Pepper (just days ago)



Summary: The OOXML scandals return to the press, reminding people that corruption is still at the heart of Microsoft Corporation

RARELY do we find journalists with guts these days, but Mark Ballard has been the exception for quite a few years and by addressing Microsoft's "fuckwittery" he helps bring to light again a lot of the corruption surrounding OOXML -- a systematic abuse of massive scale which the press almost forgot about. Based on one who seems to have conspired with Microsoft, standards just don't matter and here is what Ballard has to say about that:



A senior member of a leading British tech standards body has launched an excoriating attack on Cabinet Office efforts to implement the central plank of its ICT Strategy.

The outburst has opened a crack into the secretive world of formal tech standards, suggesting it may be convulsed in a fit of pique not seen since Microsoft got its derided OOXML document format passed by standards bodies around the world in 2008.

Alex Brown, British Standards Institute committee member infamous for overseeing OOXML's approval, said in his personal blog how he had become exasperated with government efforts to bring ICT standards in line with its policy of easy interoperability of public computer systems.

[...]

The failure and, it was alleged at the time, susceptibility of that process to corruption may have been demonstrated by the OOXML affair.

The alleged corruption was never confirmed, to this correspondent's knowledge. But it has for more substantial reasons left the process with a stigmata that goes right to the heart of government policy.

The culture of transparency that has swept along in the wake of Sir Tim Berners Lee's open data initiative has in addition made the BSI look anachronistic.


We wrote about the BSI in posts such as:



The good thing about OOXML is, it helped show that Microsoft never changed.

OOXML is fraud

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