Remember the Microsoft OOXML "porn spam technique" incident from Document Freedom Day? It is difficult to forget given how disturbing it was. Yet again, having witnessed Microsoft’s well-orchestrated crashing of PlayStation 3 launch parties around the world, none of this is surprising. Microsoft proved before that it sees nothing wrong in sabotaging other people’s celebrations. It’s the high management that had it planned and approved, not a group of overzealous Microsoft enthusiasts.
Another way for Microsoft to attack ODF would be to oppose the standardization of ODF 1.2. They will use the same tactics they had with OOXML, but in the opposite direction. It will be funny to watch how the ISO and the national standards bodies will switch all of a sudden to a demanding stance on ODF 1.2, which will only be an iteration of an existing ISO standard. I am afraid we will witness such a shocking twist in the standardization bodies’ attitude.
The previous post spoke about Novell’s collaboration with Microsoft on making things hard if not impossible for others to keep up with. Novell is pushing hard for Microsoft’s way of doing things, leading to an identity loss of standards and GNU/Linux in the process. From the same post as above, mind the following bits which speak also about Novell.
Would you believe me if I wrote that I knew what’s in store after XPS? Let’s bet I know it. After OOXML shall come XPS. And once Microsoft will have locked the whole industry with its document formats, they will try to do the same with multimedia formats. Expect the future Windows Media formats, their proprietary video codecs to follow the same path. Their glue shall be Silverlight, which in turn rests on Windows Presentation Foundation and the .NET framework. The license shall be the famous OSP, effectively barring GPL implementations and leaving many other issues, such as the RAND mode applied on the covered technologies, in the shadows, but always as a critical factor to consider. Novell will follow, as usual, with incomplete and patent-riddled implementations that you will only be able to safely use with Novell products.
Those failing to realise why Novell is on Microsoft’s side need only consider Novell’s silence amid the abuses against ISO and the rest of the industry. Red Hat posted many objections; as did Google, Oracle, FFII, FSFE, IBM and Ubuntu’s Founder, Mark Shuttleworth. Where was Novell? Well, of course, Novell quietly helps OOXML. Being Microsoft's vassal is its competitive 'advantage', much like the use of Linux FUD.
Ironically enough, while Novell seems happy with OOXML, it’s actually a notorious and very large ‘Microsoft shop’ at Britain that still says “No” to OOXML. Its name is BECTA and we last wrote about it a couple of weeks back. From BECTA’s statement on this matter:
During the standard approval process Becta wrote to the British Standards committee responsible for co-ordinating the UK’s response to the proposed Office Open XML standard asking that it considers carefully whether two different ISO standards was the best outcome that could be achieved in this important area. We were clear that the interests of non technical users (including most teachers and parents) would be best served by a single standard which accommodated the existing Open Document Format (ODF) specification, and any extensions necessary to provide the required compatibility with various legacy Microsoft formats.
When BECTA complains about Microsoft {anything}, then it’s time to glance out the windows [sic] and wait for flying pigs to appear. Perhaps it’s just known too well that OOXML is so horrible that even the closest among Microsoft’s partners are unable to accept it (and accept responsibility). Maybe the emperor is just far too naked. Yet everyone is blinded by the money, the incentives, the bribes. █
It is going to get a little harder to trust articles from Joe Brockmeier (better known as Zonker), especially if his journalistic integrity has the intersecting — if not conflicting — interests of Novell, which views itself as a Microsoft partner. Joe is now working at Novell, just a a gentle reminder.
Novell tries hard to ‘sell’ the word “interoperability”, which it has been reciting for well over a year. It strives to rename or mis-characterise its embarrassing software patent deal, under which Novell pays Microsoft to have things working the proprietary way (with ‘Microsoft tax’) rather than the standards-based way. We will shortly supply another new example of this.
The other day we wrote about how Novell boosters use their positions of authority to push forward Novell’s agenda. By association, they help Microsoft as well.
Joe Brockmeier, who now works at Novell, is among the writers at Linux Magazines and he now pitches ‘interoperability’ (maybe taxoperability) in his article/interview “Making Interoperability Possible”. It’s not about standards.
The ‘Norway story’ continues. Yesterday we pieced together somewhat of a summary which included a new list of irregularities. Now come the protests.
Steve Pepper, the former Chairman of the Norwegian committee responsible for deciding the Norwegian vote on OOXML, is calling for a demonstration to take place outside the building where SC34, the ISO committee that has been landed with OOXML, is holding its spring plenary.
The demonstration will take place outside Håndverkeren, Rosenkrantzgate 7, Oslo, Norway, on Wednesday April 9 at 12.00. Among the slogans are:
No to ISO approval of OOXML!
Defend the integrity of ISO!
Microsoft: Support ODF!
Ecma: Withdraw OOXML!
Norway must say no to OOXML!
Those calls or accusations are probably intended to attract some media attention and raise awareness of the problem, which will in turn pressure those involved/guilty to come forward and have things rectified. The European Commission still investigates the situation in Norway, having seen ISO become Microsoft prey.
Over at the Financial Times, an article has just been published (subscription required) to more frankly explain the situation and its possible effect on Microsoft’s brand value, which we already know is declining very rapidly.
Allegations of committee-stuffing, the outcome of votes overridden by political appointees, a final decision that many involved consider tainted: this may sound like a discredited election in some third world country. But it is actually a description of an ugly fight over international technical standards that wrapped up this week. Microsoft came out on top, but at the cost of tarnishing its reputation and the credibility of an important back-room process that oils the wheels of many global industries.
As a writer from ComputerWorld explained a few days ago, Microsoft may have lost this standards war due to the impact of negative perception alone. █
“F*cking Eric Schmidt is a f*cking p*ssy. I’m going to f*cking bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I’m going to f*cking kill Google.”
Just to state or perhaps even emphasise the obvious, OOXML is a very large stack of proprietary Microsoft technologies, which directly contradict and antagonise existing standards, and not by coincidence. Microsoft has always established itself separately from the rest of the industry, as the following quote immediately reminds us:
“We want to own these standards, so we should not participate in standards groups. Rather, we should call ‘to me’ to the industry and set a standard that works now and is for everyone’s benefit. We are large enough that this can work.”
We already have an open standard for mathematical formulae and notation, it is called MathML and is published by the W3C math working group.
OOXML ignores this and uses its own Microsoft-specific Maths language.
We already have an open standard for vector graphics called Scalable Vector Graphics. This was produced to replace vendor specific formats such as Adobe’s PGML and Microsoft’s VML.
OOXML ignores this and uses Microsoft-specific VML.
We have a specification (RFC 3987) for UTF-8 capable Internet addresses. This allows URLs to be written in any language.
OOXML ignores this and can only use Latin characters in URLs, so speakers of Chinese, Japanese, Korean and many other languages are plain out of luck.
Some of the Microsoft comments have just been leaked out of the ECMA fortress. Microsoft continues to ignore the Muslim world, and they don’t want to correct its WORKDAY function in order to ‘do not break backward compatibility’: “Weekend days (Saturday and Sunday) are not considered as working days.”
The world should be pleased to note, that with the approval of ISO/IEC 29500, Microsoft’s Vector Markup Language (VML), after failing to be approved by the W3C in 1998 and after being neglected for the better part of a decade, is now also ISO-approved. Thus VML becomes the first and only standard that Microsoft Internet Explorer fully supports.
We wrote a lot more about this earlier today. It’s bad news for the Internet as well. Now is the time to advocate ODF and ensure that OOXML gains no traction.
“Before Paul and I started the company, we had been involved in some large-scale software projects that were real disasters. They just kept pouring people in, and nobody knew how they were going to stabilize the project. We swore to ourselves that we would do better.”
–Bill Gates, Programmers at Work by Susan Lammers (1986) ISBN 0914845713
“We’ve got to put a lot of money into changing behavior.”
–Bill Gates
As you may be aware by now, Norway has been ahead of many when it comes to ODF adoption. Just months ago we spotted this report. Translated to English it stated:
Norway: ODF Must Be Used on Government Websites’ Forms
Everyone should have equal access to public information: Open standards become compulsory within the government
The government has decided that all information on governmental websites should be available in the open formats HTML, PDF or ODF. With this decision the times when public documents where only available in Microsoft’s Word-format is coming to an end.
We have already covered this here. To repeat some more citations from last year:
Standard Norge actually gives a conditioned yes to OOXML, but that’s a big NO with comments.
As we explained or at least mentioned on several occasions recently [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9], Norway’s latest vote was a big fiasco. Some people are finally gathering evidence and putting it up for display. The list is very large. Here is just a small arbitrary portion.
[This is a draft written by Tobias Brox and may not reflect EFNs official point of view. Also edited by Geir Isene, same disclaimer]
List of “irregularities”, possible irregularities and “dishonesty” in the Norwegian OOXML “war”. Disclaimer: We’re not implying that anyone has broken any laws – but a technical standard should be evolved and approved on it’s technical merits, not by political or commercial pressure, nor from personal opinions from administrative staff in SN.
2007: committee stuffing: the NS/K 185 committee grew from 6-7 persons to 30 persons due to the OOXML case…
So, the committee grew almost 5 times larger. Can anyone call this “normal”? Is this “regular” or “irregular”? Given the accusations from September 2007, should anyone be surprised at all?
Remember that OOXML is not a done deal yet, but Microsoft will spare no moment and waste this jubilation opportunity. It will most likely continue to celebrate while it lasts and give the impression that Microsoft Office is now a standard. Toby says a little more about it in this new video. █
Update on 14/04/2008: the video above is now available as Ogg Theora.
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