11.19.08
Posted in Formats, Microsoft, Open XML, ISO at 7:50 am by Roy Schestowitz
“ISO is dead for software standards. Do you need an official funeral?”
–Benjamin Henrion, FFII (days ago)
Mischief O’ mischief, how we love thy
Microsoft past our Gates we let be
Proprietary junk, no less than a mule’s load
Surely we must not care how for ISO this will bode
And here we present on this very special day
A bogus format so passionately bribed for
To shows that corruption can truly pay
Hereby we announce with unprecedented glee
Patent-encumbered rubbish, finally you can purchase for a fee █
References:
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11.18.08
Posted in Microsoft, Office Suites, OpenDocument, SUN, Open XML, OpenOffice, ISO at 1:11 pm by Roy Schestowitz
Adding slur to cronyism
WE try hard to stay away from Brown and not feed him, but it’s getting difficult because he provokes in his blog. Those you believe that OOXML has been (and continues to be) a Microsoft fiasco are being ridiculed by no-one else than the convenor the OOXML BRM, who is being exceptionally rude.
Alex Brown, in ODF – OASIS and JTC 1 Get It Together, refers to those like me, who have been vocal in our disapproval of ISO’s handling of office-document standards, as the “tinfoil brigade” with a “crazed oppositional narrative”. He even provides an illustration of the use of a shiny silver fashion statement. Is this fair?
[…]
I’m Angry · I can’t help it. I’m actually quite idealistic and believe that collaborative work which transcends the boundaries of nations and enterprises has the potential to benefit individuals, governments, and businesses everywhere. I cannot give an honest and complete account of my feelings about the ECMA/JTC1 process without resorting to coarse language and direct accusations against certain parties whom I believe to have acted at best unethically. ¶
For the purposes of this little essay I will for obvious reasons restrain myself. I will, however, offer two assertions:
* In the context of the process that led to the existence of ISO/IEC International Standard 29500, it is reasonable to be angry.
* It is not reasonable to draw conclusions about the rights and wrongs of a complex and important issue, in which billions of dollars are at stake, based on who’s being polite.
Alex Brown [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23] and the other deniers of the OOXML corruptions must not be left to get away and rewrite history.
Simon Phipps responded to this too by saying: “I agree with Tim; Alex Brown’s analysis is cavalier in the omission of the rest of the industry context around the gaming of JTC1, to the point one has to ask oneself why.”
When people fail to distance themselves from corruption they should not cry foul. Brown invited the trouble he has been getting. █
Also in the news:
“The ISO process, brutal and corrupt as it was, has been covered to death by everyone.”
–Tim Bray
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Posted in Microsoft, Novell, Patents, ISO at 8:31 am by Roy Schestowitz
Spotted in Alan’s Web site just a moment ago:
Mono includes: (1) the ISO standard parts, including C# and CLI, and also (2) the Microsoft proprietary parts, including Windows.Forms and ASP.NET and ADO.NET.
http://www.mono-project.com/WinForms
http://www.mono-project.com/ASP.NET
http://www.mono-project.com/ADO.NET
Mono is written by Novell. Novell has a patent deal with Microsoft, so that Novell has a license from Microsoft to write these non-free parts of Mono, and to include them in SLED.
They are indeed open source, but they are not licensed by Microsoft to run anywhere but in SLED. Not in OpenSuSe, not in Ubuntu, not in Fedora, not in Debian, not in Slackware, not in Gentoo, not anywhere but SLED.
When you install Mono 2 on any Linux system, you are installing software which includes Microso[f]t proprietary technologies without having a license from Microsoft to do so (unless you run SLED).
What is worse, if you use Mono to port to Linux programs originally written in .NET for Windows, then any such ported programs on your Linux system will include and rely upon the unlicensed Mono libraries on your system.
What exactly is Mono all about? I think this page sums it up nicely:
http://www.mono-project.com/Guide:_Porting_Winforms_Applications
Mono is all about getting existing Windows applications, and their Microsoft-proprietary dependencies, installed on to your Linux system, so that you will in the near future require a paid-for license from Microsoft to run programs on your Linux system.
Note: the argument built in this post is structured using references only from the Mono project itself. It does not rely on any potentially biased words from sources such as the Boycott Novell website … only the Mono project’s own words are quoted.
This is a concise and elegant explanation. People must learn from history. █
“…Microsoft wished to promote SCO and its pending lawsuit against IBM and the Linux operating system. But Microsoft did not want to be seen as attacking IBM or Linux.”
–Larry Goldfarb, investor in SCO
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10.27.08
Posted in Red Hat, Microsoft, GNU/Linux, Standard, Interoperability, FOSS, ISO at 12:09 pm by Roy Schestowitz
DO YOU like standards?
Do you like standards when Microsoft preaches them to you?
How about ‘open’ standards that are brought to you by a company that blackmailes, bullies, bribes and lies to establish them?
The same company which shattered the standards industry wants to bring some of its brainwash to more innocent minds. It seems like a familiar story.
“The same company which shattered the standards industry wants to bring some of its brainwash to more innocent minds.”Will you attend such an event?
Well, worry not as nobody else will attend, either. There was a plan for “Some […] Rick Jelliffe from Topologi with an Overview of XBRL, Microsoft’s Lawrence Crumption with a presentation entitled ‘Openly Excited: Microsoft, Open Source and Open Specification’…”
For the uninitiated, Rick Jelliffe was actively involved in promoting OOXML, even on Microsoft’s payroll [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18]. But it’s all cancelled now. As reported by IDG, “The Open Standards 2008 conference scheduled to be held in Sydney this week has been cancelled due to a lack of registrations.”
Given the farce that ISO has become, who can blame the target audience for lack of attendance? Standards as a whole were disreputed — arguably ruined — by the Microsoft/ISO tag-team operation. And sadly enough, with the decline of standards, the only party to be grinning with glee must be Microsoft.
In the blogosphere, turncoat journalists, now enlisted by Microsoft, preach about interoperability, which only interferes with open standards that Microsoft deliberately ignores.
Elsewhere in the press, there is a lot of harping and raving from Microsoft (even a press release) about joining a standards group, but skepticism is only to be expected.
I’ve no idea whether AMQP is indeed the bee’s knees, as Red Hat would have us believe, but I do know this: if Microsoft *really* wants to join in the open fun, it must always freely license its contributions, as Red Hat says it has done for AMQP. If the devil *insists* on supping with you, do check that you have a good supply of long spoons first.
After decades of dirty operations, does Microsoft believe it deserves trust? It’s like the famous story about The Scorpion and the Tortoise. █
“[A]mazing that corruption is excepted by the entire developed world. stunning that it has met with resistance only with some developing nations and maybe the european union. what should have been an overwhelming anger by all nations . the notion that developed nation are immune to corruption is bogus. microsoft did it in full view, without any hesitation. microsoft should be nailed for this.”
–Ashok Pai
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10.10.08
Posted in Law, Microsoft, Patents, OpenDocument, Europe, Courtroom, Open XML, IBM, ISO at 11:31 am by Roy Schestowitz
“[A]mazing that corruption is excepted by the entire developed world. Stunning that it has met with resistance only with some developing nations and maybe the European Union. What should have been an overwhelming anger by all nations. The notion that developed nation are immune to corruption is bogus. Microsoft did it in full view, without any hesitation. Microsoft should be nailed for this.”
–Ashok Pai
NOW THAT speculations about further abuse in Europe continue to seem more reasonable, the European Commission (EC) is said to be investigating. As the financial turmoil shows, there is always need for good policing and regulation, so the EC has a responsibility to show that those who do the crime will also do the time.
The latest news from Norway got covered here before [1, 2, 3, 4], but IDG has just circulated this article and threw it to the mix. Here is its summary:
Over half of Norway’s ISO body, Standard Norway, have resigned over the country’s approval for OOXML, citing Microsoft influence.
[sarcasm] But hey! If most of those standards ‘experts’ from Norway quit in protest, it must be just bias. They must be Rabid™ ‘Haters®’ (bad labels [1, 2]) of Microsoft, right?[/sarcasm]
Never mind the truth and never mind the fact that ISO has officially been grabbed by Microsoft. As Rob Weir put it the other day, “Microsoft’s representation has swelled so it now comprises 20-50% of any given meeting. And that does not count those additional “independent” companies and contractors that are employed by Microsoft to create OOXML convertors or to consult with on OOXML matters. […] I think you’ll find no other case in SC34 attendance records of a single company sending more than a single representative. Everyone else in the world sends one person. IBM once sent two people. Microsoft sends ten or a dozen.”
Where on Earth of ‘the press’ and why is it still shying away from such a distasteful disaster? Other curious minds want to know.
the company has existed since the early 90s using pure anti-competitive tactics and nothing more and with their IBM handed monopoly position, they have thrived. MS-OOXML was 100% a reaction to ODF, their tactics to use ECMA and the fasttrack mechanism 100% a reaction to ODF, and the stuffing of the ISO committees to get MS-OOXML passed through the fasttrack process still 100% a reaction to ODF. And now, they are stuffing more committees so they can take over ISO’s ODF control.
And the tech press is more concerned with iPhone SDK licensing issues while all this has been going on. We know who still owns the press these days.
In addition to the sheer abuse of this process, there are also those infamous legal traps in OOXML, as recently reaffirmed by attorney Brendan Scott. Another fairly comprehensive analysis has just been posted by Andre, who writes:
The main sponsor behind OOXML, the Microsoft Corporation, assured the European Commission that they would chose a RF model for their future Office format.1 However, their public affairs representatives repeatedly casted doubt whether their chosen patent license model would enable implementations under the GNU GPL and forcefully lobbied domestic and oversees legislators against open standards. The intense struggle has two levels. On one layer the question is RAND or RF as appropriate licensing conditions, on a second layer the attempt was to redefine the terminology of “open standards” to become RAND compatible. A “success” of the lobbying effort was the ITU-T definition of “open standards” drafted by a patent attorney working group which made the limbo for RAND licensing conditions. As an effect all international standards would become “open standards”. It comes at no surprise that vendors are sceptical about the honesty of the Microsoft patent schemes and are suspicious about hidden agendas.
There is an unconfirmed rumour now that the Commission might not investigate the ISO scandals because they are too afraid to intervene in an international organisation. IBM is said to be pushing to ensure the case is concluded.
“IBM is said to be pushing to ensure the case is concluded.”Dangerous here is the fact that the court system is very expensive for anyone else to pursue, as the UKUUG has already found out [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10].
In the United States, someone has said that there is case law concerning committee stuffing or vote rigging (Comcast was caught stuffing it up and it’s far from the first time for Microsoft), but if the commission wants to carry out a complete or at least comprehensive probe, a lot of traveling will be involved, e.g. to ‘puppet nations’.
Two months ago we showed how ISO members were prepared to nominate Microsoft itself for the maintainable of so-called interoperability. As it turns out now, the already-Microsoft-stacked SC34 is now set to elect some more people. This one is a recipe for further abuse and more committee stuffing. From the page:
In accordance Resolution 8 of the SC 34 Jeju plenary meeting, Working Group 5 has been established. SC 34 members are invited to nominate their experts to participate in this Working Group. Please send a list of participants showing names, affiliations and e-mail addresses to the SC 34 Secretariat by 2008-11-15. The information received will be forwarded to the WG 5 Convener for creation of a mailing list.
Further down it shows that Microsoft (and its cronies) are bound to decide on the creation of a committee that handles ODF.
Resolution 8: Establishment of Working Group 5
SC 34 establishes Working Group 5 as follows:
Title: Document Interoperability
Terms of Reference: Develop principles of, and guidelines for, interoperability among documents represented using heterogeneous ISO/IEC document file formats. The initial work includes preparation of the Technical Report on ISO/IEC 26300 – ISO/IEC 29500 translation.
SC 34 instructs its Secretariat to issue a call for participation to the SC 34 members and to request ISO and IEC to publicise the existence of WG 5 to encourage participation from all who are eligible.
The room for abuse there is amazing. No wonder ISO is dead. █
“I have lost my sleep and peace of mind for last two months over these distasteful activities by Microsoft.”
–Professor Deepak Phatak
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10.08.08
Posted in OpenDocument, Open XML, IBM, ISO at 2:37 pm by Roy Schestowitz
There is an important and interesting comment in Rob Weir’s blog. The following was said by Weir in relation to the ODF hijack that we showed last night, in reply to a question from WuMingShi:
There are several participants in SC34 who have had the stated goal of taking control of OOXML and ODF and maintaining them both in SC34 WG’s. They’ve been quite open about this plan. The problem is that they are planning a future for standards that they neither own nor control nor have technical expertise.
This was an interesting goal when they first articulated this idea, around two years ago. However, now that we’ve seen that JTC1 is easily corruptible, both at the NB, SC and administrative levels, that JTC1 is incapable of fairly carrying out its own Directives, and that in practice SC34 is now so dominated by Microsoft that we could consider it a fully integrated division of Microsoft Corp., this push toward maintaining ODF in SC34 is both naive and dangerous. It will not happen. Doing so would be a huge step backwards in participation,openness, transparency, in IP rights and in technical quality. Drain the swamp first, and then let’s talk.
Yes. You read that right. SC34 participants are shamelessly open about their plan to hijack ODF. Remember that SC34 comprises mostly Microsoft employees. Alan Lord is so angry about this that he even misspells “Microsoft.”
But OOXML is not quite dead yet. There is a danger. And one we must all be vigilant toward: There is a possibility of Microshaft and it’s Lackeys trying to gain control of the maintenance of the ODF standard. Currently this is handled by the very open and transparent OASIS organisation. This process might end up being transferred to ISO under the guise of a group known as SC34. This committee is loaded full of Microsoft puppets - several of whom are British and have shown a total disregard for due process to this date.
We shall write more about this as soon as new details emerge.
In the mean time, it’s worth noting that the fourth release candidate of OpenOffice.org 3.0 has just been released, with only days remaining before the final release.
These notes contains changes between SRC680_m242 and SRC680_m248 as well as between DEV300_m1 and DEV300_m27 as well as between OOO300_m1 and OOO300_m9.
This release will install as OpenOffice.org 3.0.
The developers of KDE report on their support of ODF in KWord. KOffice uses ODF as its default format.
It’s been a long busy month. With the impending 2.0 release, I have been hacking away polishing up ODF list support for KWord.
How scary it must be for Microsoft to see ODF adopted so rapidly. It realises that it must derail ODF — fast. █
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10.07.08
Posted in Microsoft, Finance, Deception, Standard, OpenDocument, Asia, Open XML, ISO at 10:01 pm by Roy Schestowitz
Stuffed committee effectively renders ISO obsolete
ISO does nothing to save itself from sinking. Beginning with slightly older news about the protests in Norway and the subsequent exodus [1, 2, 3, 4], there is this new article from Heise, which explains how it relates to ISO’s incompetence.
Thirteen of the twenty three members of the Standard Norge expert committee, which dealt with the standardisation of Microsoft’s OOXML document format, have announced their resignations. They are protesting against the way Norway’s decision in favour of ISO standardisation was made. In an open letter, they state that Standard Norge has clearly placed commercial interests ahead of what is best for society and what is technically and professionally desirable. In their opinion, the way it dealt with the process has resulted in Standard Norge forfeiting all credibility within the IT sector.
Now comes the uglier stuff. A reader has just infromed us that:
We now have a partial response to the question above, straight from the horse’s mouth: According to Alex Brown:
“By my (rough, unconfirmed) count, there were eight MS employees in 15 NB delegations (+ 4 people in the Ecma group) out of the 35 or so attendees.”
(http://www.robweir.com/blog/2008/10/wheres-rob.html)
12 Microsoft + Ecma people out of 35 people ! Isn’t this a record ? But of course Microsoft is NOT hijacking SC 34, as “Delegates are charged with representing national positions” (from the same horse’s mouth).
Here is the post from Rob Weir, who in protest decided not to even attend or participate in Korea’s behind-closed-doors fiasco.
To put it in perspective, the US SC34 shadow committee currently has around 20 members. Before Microsoft stuffed it we had around 7. Regardless, the US SC34 mirror committee typically sends a delegation of 2 or 3 people to international meetings. IBM attendance at these meetings has varied from 0 to 2. It really depends on where the meeting is being held. If it is being hosted by an NB where an IBM employee is a member, then he will typically attend. If something is on the agenda that I find interesting, then I’ll typically attend regardless of location.
Further reading reveals an ugly picture.
Earlier on we wrote about Microsoft hijacking Brazil’s voice (Microsoft hijacks many voices [1, 2]) and here is another nugget of information.
The company from Redmond is heavily investing in the ISO SC34 committee. Thanks to a brazilian blogger who manage to shed some light on what was going on in there, we hear now that Microsoft Korea was paying for dinner.
This seems like the old ‘gentle bribing’ of people using uninvited love and/or money. We covered such examples before [1, 2, 3, 4]. Microsoft does this type of thing quite routinely, especially when it wants to gag critics or needs to buy their consent.
At the end of the day, why capture the SC34 committee? It’s about hijacking ODF [1, 2], as expected.
In relation to those implicit threats that I received from Alex Brown (he has just moved his Web site from PHP to Microsoft ASP .NET by the way), ComputerWorld had something to say.
The point is, the *entire process* should be out in the open: that’s how we do things in the 21st century, remember - the Internet, open source, Web 2.0, that kind of stuff? You know, a collaborative endeavour that draws as widely as possible on people who have relevant skills, whoever they may be? If the ISO wants to cling to secret squirrel meetings with Terribly Important Experts in closed rooms, that’s its prerogative; but if it does, it can’t presume to be a modern global standards body with any credibility, and it should make way for others to do the job.
A transparent process should be a badge of honour for the participants, since no one can then impugn their actions, and a basic act of respect towards the users of that standard, who are not made to feel like peasants receiving grace as the holy ISO tablets are handed down from Mount Geneva.
Given the decidedly turbid process that has swirled around the standardisation of OOXML, the need for some clarity is all the greater. The idea of the ISO suing someone for doing what ought to be one of its primary responsibilities, because it might result in a loss of “revenue” - as if the whole point of the ISO and national standards bodies were to make money - is sad in the extreme.
To fight corruption, it is not always possible to remain gentle and abstain from becoming more blunt sometimes. It’s interesting to see the ODF Alliance Awards being referred to as heroism. A lot of people took heaps of personal attacks and smear campaigns [1, 2, 3, 4] for ‘daring’ to defend ODF and the integrity of the standards process. Even Andy Updegrove, the polite standards expert who wrote about this award, has already been assigned the label “Microsoft hater” (labels like these are nasty [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]) by the familiar group of snobs that is Microsoft and its money-sharing partners.
In summary, just when you think that ISO could not dive any lower, it keeps surprising. It’s already a wreck due to Microsoft OOXML; now it wants to hijack and ruin ODF too, bending it Microsoft’s way. It has already become evident who pulls ISO’s strings. █
From the Campaign for Document Freedom
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Posted in Microsoft, OpenDocument, Asia, Open XML, ISO at 9:00 am by Roy Schestowitz
Outrageous folly
Whilst we angrily keep writing about Microsoft’s apparent attempt to ‘take over’ ODF [1, 2, 3], a warning from Brazil arrives. Microsoft is indeed hijacking the process and now represents an entire very large country in a meeting that involved ODF.
Last week, 1st of October, was held in Seoul (Korea) a meeting of SC34, the JTC1 committee responsible for standards as the ODF and OpenXML.
At this meeting, Brazil was represented by Microsoft.
I and several other members of our committee protested against this indication, but we had our protests silenced by the Director of ABNT (Brazilian NB) that said that this decision was not our prerogative and that if Microsoft would pay for their own representative’s trip, their indication was approved.
Also reminded us that since the beginning of activities of our group at ABNT, he tells us about having a “financial fund” provided by the committee’s organizations, to cover expenses like this. As we do not have that fund and Microsoft has offered to pay their own expenses, their indication was approved by him (rather not comment on anything about it, I get stomach ache by remembering this sad fact). Just to clarify, the other committee’s members did not indicated any representative because we tought that this wasn’t an important meeting to spend our time and money with.
This is not the first time that Microsoft, a selfish and vicious convicted monopolist, is assigned to ‘represent’ the interests of entire nations. Time for people to stand up and protest? █
Update: the stuffed committee (with Microsoft employees) is already having its negative effects. It inches a step closer to Microsoft shenanigans taking control of ODF, slurring OASIS in the process.
The international standards body ISO has offered to help maintain the ODF document standard alongside its work on the rival Microsoft-originated OOXML specification, saying its creator Oasis is not dealing with defect reports quickly enough.
At a meeting in Korea last week, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) committee for document standards, SC 34, issued a liaison statement to Oasis, the body that created ODF. It requested an “alignment” of maintenance of ODF between the work done at Oasis and that within ISO.
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« Previous entries ·
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.