09.11.07
More ISO Madness — Only Accepts Microsoft Word Files
“This is truly an insult and a bruise to the ISO’s credibility.”The irregular behavior at the ISO continues. Hold your hats because this one’s a bit of a shocker. According to the following bit of text, the accumulation of comments in Microsoft Word format is no coincidence, accident, or choice made by the standards committees around the world. The ISO actually requests/demands that people use Microsoft Word (or an application capable of ‘emulating’/mimicking/backward-engineering Word’s proprietary formats). Isn’t that ironic? From a standards body voting on open standards…
Note: updated with the official ISO results except in the not yet clear “Cuban case” and the Lybian vote, finally submitted by post mail, because they decided not to accept the ISO imposition to send the comments in a deprecated, exclusive and proprietary “.doc” format.
This is truly an insult and a bruise to the ISO’s credibility. Pamela Jones, which is apparently unaware of this at this stage (she’ll know shortly), has the following to say:
The comments have been officially published, although as .doc files, sigh. Here’s the zip file to download). But I thought I’d make them available to you as HTML also, which is how the members got them to make sure everyone has access and because of my idea.
On Groklaw, you can help organise the comments on this pile of paper.
Related articles:
- Norbert Bollow starts OpenISO
- Critics Skeptical That Microsoft Will Be Able To Alter Vote On OOXML
- APEC and OOXML - both pointless and annoying
- OOXML is defective by design
- Microsoft Loses, Spins Open XML Vote
- Microsoft FUD Watch: OOXML Edition
- Microsoft spins OOXML loss as a win
- Lord, what fools these mortals be!”
Highlight: Novell was the first to acknowledge that Microsoft FUD tactics had substance. Novell then used anti-Linux FUD to market itself. 
Highlight: Xandros let Microsoft make patent claims and brag about (paid-for) OOXML support. 
Highlight: Linspire's CEO not only fell into Microsoft arms, but he also assisted the company's attack on GNU/Linux. 
Highlight: Microsoft craves pseudo (proprietary) standards and gets its way using proxies and influence which it buys. 
Highlight: The invasion into the open source world is intended to leave Linux companies neglected, due to financial incentives from Microsoft. 
Analysis: Xen, an open source hypervisor, possibly fell victim to Microsoft's aggressive (and stealthy) acquisition-by-proxy strategy. 
Yuhong Bao said,
October 19, 2007 at 8:59 pm
In fairness, years ago, Word was the only choice.
Roy Schestowitz said,
October 19, 2007 at 10:37 pm
They could at least accept RTF, (X)HTML, or whatever. This is just mainly text.
Roy Bixler said,
March 11, 2008 at 10:24 am
It’s bizarre to say the least, since ODF is already an ISO standard document format. Why don’t they use it? In fact, what’s interesting is that, according to the “http://www.noooxml.org/ballotresults” page, Libya was a country that voted “NO” to OOOXML as a standard, they tried to submit their comments in the ISO-standard Open Document Format, but their comments were refused.
Roy Schestowitz said,
March 11, 2008 at 11:39 am
They ought to have voice-recorded the comments and posted them to ISO (as OGG) just for spite.