Roy Schestowitz <newsgroups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> espoused:
> ____/ Freeride on Thursday 19 July 2007 05:56 : \____
>
>> http://news.zdnet.co.uk/itmanagement/0,1000000308,39288082,00.htm
>>
>>>An open office document format developed by Microsoft has received a
>>>major setback in achieving a certification which would make it more
>>>widely accepted as a true technology standard.
>>
>>>On Friday, Office Open XML (OOXML) failed to gain approval in a vote by a
>>>sub-group of the International Committee for Information Technology
>>>Standards (INCITS), a standards body influential with the US government.
>>
>>>OOXML has strong support from Microsoft, and is a rival to the
>>>OpenDocument Format (ODF) favoured by open-source vendors and companies
>>>such as IBM. But while ODF has gained important acceptance from the
>>>International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO), OOXML is still
>>>struggling to be seen as a truly open.
>
> It doesn't tell the full story. What about Microsoft gaming those panels?
>
Their behaviour is incredible. It's almost as if nobody can quite
believe what is happening, since nobody has ever tried quite so overtly
to "fix" standards bodies in this way. The traditional approach was to
spend the minutes, hours, days, weeks, months or years required to
persuade enough of your peers to your viewpoint, taking on their
concerns as you went along, until you got to a point where you had some
kind of draft which was agreeable to all.
Microsoft, having declared standards as "dead" on the launch of Windows
3.11 or Win95 (can't recall which one), now seem to regard standards
bodies as just something they can manipulate as they see fit to suit
their present commercial requirements, irrespective of the interests of
any other parties. This is clearly not an acceptable state of affairs.
We need some kind of reset on how computational and storage standards
are being adopted the world over. We need to consider these from the
viewpoint of both national and global interests. Do we really want the
world's greatest libraries to be locked into a proprietary format like
OOXML? I think not - we risk an atrocity as damaging as the destruction
of the library in Alexandria.
At some point along the way, Governments stopped listening to academics
in Universities, and started listening the commercial sales people from
businesses, mostly foreign ones. The MBA culture and the preponderance
of lawyers in government, coupled with the increasing irrelevance of
traditional engineering bodies like the IEE (now IET), has resulted in
everything being seen as an "outsourcing decision" for a "rapid cost
saving". National Archives are not for Microsoft to proprietarise at
taxpayer's expense; they belong to the people, and the long-term
storage of them must be in the hands of people who truly understand the
long-term requirements of free access, and not in the hands of people
who understand how to get lock-in and squeeze customers.
How long will it be before Microsoft demand a few billion from HMG to
"upgrade" the National Archives to their latest Office Suite?
--
| Mark Kent -- mark at ellandroad dot demon dot co dot uk |
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