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ISO on its way down: Standardizing half-baked proprietary technologies because a monopolist vendor doesn't hesitate throwing in vast amounts of money and market power making people vote for its technology? A strange way to have good "standards" around. Completely asides that: Given... more
Reviewed by kawazu Apr 01 2008, 11:40pm ( 3 reviews ) • noooxml.org
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Rated by kawazu on Apr 01 2008, 11:40pm
ISO on its way down: Standardizing half-baked proprietary technologies because a monopolist vendor doesn't hesitate throwing in vast amounts of money and market power making people vote for its technology? A strange way to have good "standards" around. Completely asides that: Given that ODF has been ISO-approved quite a while earlier, why bother approving a second Office document type standard? It's either "standard", or it isn't - there's absolutely no point having "two" standards as this is likely to damage the idea of having a standardized format at all. Personally, I don't really care who's to push forth the very standard as long as a few boundaries aren't crossed: The standard should be completely free to be used by anyone, i.o.w. be free of patents, RANDs and any other approaches likely to lock some vendor out for whichever reasons or requiring implementors to pay someone in order to be allowed to use this standard. Maybe it wasn't necessary to be this way, a while ago, but while having a vast set of technologies adhering to this paradigm around, this seems to be just a reasonable approach. If Microsoft could come up wit OOXML fully free of patent dependencies, being a fully approvable "free" standard, no one would think twice I guess. But the idea of even more empowering a single (already monopolistic) company by making its proprietary file types "standard" is definitely the wrong way.
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Rated by Daoro on Aug 28 2007, 1:39pm
From the page: "OOXML is an immature documentation of one vendor's proprietary document format which depends on software patents held by this vendor, which block interoperability. It conflicts with existing ISO standards. More than three hundred technical comments have been raised by industry, academics, researchers, and experts. The ISO JTC-1 Directive p.48 section 9.8 requires national bodies to vote "NO with comments" if there remain unanswered technical problems. The accuracy and honesty of the voting process has been questioned in many countries."
