Bonum Certa Men Certa

No Lessons Learned by ISO?

ISO Sold Out to ECMA



According to the new text which is hosted in Andy Updegrove's Web log, ISO is more interested in burial of evidence (and itself) than in self punishment and cure. Using gentle words, Andy explained why he is troubled.

Why troubled? Because these elements, when added to those that come before, basically add up to a ratification of the conduct of the Geneva BRM. To my reading, not one single element of Recommendation 5 addresses any of the concerns raised relating to the BRM - the voting procedures adopted, the amount of time to be provided in advance to consider proposed dispositions, or the timing of the delivery of a complete specification prior to a vote (admittedly this last element is beyond the scope of the BRM itself, but this concern could have been the subject of a further recommendation).


For information about the unspeakable BRM, see [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12]. It's akin to the ACTA, which can almost be characterised as white-collar crime [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 5].

As Groklaw points out, linking to Exhibit A, double standards at ISO prevail as well: "In reducing the number of alternatives to a reasonable minimum, JTC 1 and other SDOs have demonstrated that it is not necessary and may not be desirable to choose only one alternative or option for standardization. Further, JTC 1 notes that the cycle of innovation in the ICT sector has resulted in the continuous introduction of new technologies that improve upon existing standards. Any attempt to choose only one standard would ignore and threaten to inhibit the cycle of innovation that continues to fuel this industry. Therefore, JTC 1 recognizes its commitment to ISO’s and IEC’s 'one standard' principle; however, it recognizes that neither it nor its SCs are in a position to mandate either the creation or the use of a single standard, and that there are times when multiple standards make the most sense in order to respond to the needs of the marketplace and of society at large."

“They fail to establish universality, which renders them moot.”Putting all the corruption involved aside for a moment, it is clear that ISO has grown irrelevant because it fails to respect the rule which speaks of "commitment to ISO’s and IEC’s 'one standard' principle." This, as Benjamin Henrion pointed out last week, means that "ISO is dead for software standards." They fail to establish universality, which renders them moot.

This latest decision which is made in retrospect may be -- as one must remember -- carried out by an ISO that is already occupied by self-serving cronies who perfume their own sins and hope for history to dissolve gracefully, then be rewritten.

Speaking of ISO being ripped apart from the inside, worth watching is the following list of attendants that contains people who are on Microsoft's payroll, such as Rex Jaeschke, Jean Paoli, Doug Mahugh and Isabelle Valet-Harper. It was the same in the BRM and other decision-making phases. Valet-Harper was mentioning the meeting in Jeju, so it could be related to the ODF hijack [1, 2]. The European Commission is hopefully watching this closely.

Speaking of ODF, I exchanged some E-mails with IBM, criticising them for foolishly allowing Microsoft to get involved in ODF after they had fought it viciously, if not illegally. For more information about ODF, here is a report from the latest ODF workshop.

The OASIS ODF Adoption TC and the new OASIS ODF Interoperability and Conformance TC met informally at the OpenOffice.org 2008 conference in Beijing, on November 6, 2008 for an all day workshop.


Playing diplomatic games with Microsoft is pointless. Companies like Google, Oracle, IBM and Sun should turn a cold shoulder to Microsoft after what they had done. History supports such a decision and so are continents that declared Microsoft an abusive monopolist. The industry does not need Microsoft anymore. Microsoft is crumbling anyway.

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