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Gary Edwards

A Savage Journey … ODF at the OOXML BRM « A Frantic Opposition - 0 views

robweird.wordpress.com/...a-savage-journey

brm ecma geneva iso odf ooxml opendocument openxml standards

shared by Gary Edwards on 07 Mar 08 - Cached
  • A Savage Journey … ‘Erupting from my vivid nightmares into the retro 80s faded luxury of a five-star hotel in Geneva, the pictures of the first victim reappeared on the wall.  The head of the Brazilian delegation-it’s only a matter of time now. My mind thrashes to disentangle the thrown spaghetti threads of blurred reasoning; who’s next, is it just the heads of delegation they are after, any NB member, P-members only? The fog lifts and it’s worse.  Who is behind this, them or us?  We outnumber them, but maybe their plan is more devious.  Must find Bonky Bob, he’ll know what to do.’ Enough levity for now.  The BRM has held few surprises, other than the rather galling situation where I was forced to publicly toe the INCITS line by the temporary head of delegation, a Microsoft employee, against my better judgement.
Graham Perrin

Next round of ODF vs OOXML… « CyberTech Rambler - 0 views

ctrambler.wordpress.com/...next-round-of-odf-vs-ooxml

shared by Graham Perrin on 12 May 09 - Cached
  • approval of an standard that wasn’t ready
  • no one at ISO listened
  • The whole OOXML thing is a collection of mistakes
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • in the time frame taken to approve it
  • by National Body to trust that BRM has influence
  • by BRM for not attending to every concerns of national bodies
  • for not incorporating BRM resolutions in the published standard
  • OOXML is fundamentally intended to document a format for a pre-existing technology and feature set of recent proprietary systems.
  • years for IS29500 to have a really good debugged version
  • years for ODF to have a good, complete debugged version
  • the nature of big standards
  • sad about OOXML meeting
  • Apple, Oracle and British Library did not even bothered to turn up
  • Paul Merrell on 13 May 09
     
    Found myself blocked from commenting on that blog entry for some reason. Here's the comment I tried to post. @ctrambler "Between vendor-heavy or user-heavy, I choose vendor-heavy. It is after all, a office document format designed for office application. Linking with other systems is important, but it is not the ultimate aim." That statement bespeaks lack of familiarity with what an IT standard *IS.* But it is a lack of familiarity shared by all too many who work on IT standards. Standards are about uniformity, not variability. An international standard must by law specify [i] all characteristics [ii] of an identifiable product or group of products [iii] only in mandatory "must" or "must not" terms. WTDS 135 EC - Asbestos, (World Trade Organization Appellate Body; 12 March 2001; HTML version), para. 66-70, http://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/dispu_e/cases_e/ds135_e.htm And IT standards in particular must "clearly and unambiguously specify all conformity requirements that are essential to achieve the interoperability." ISO/IEC JTC 1 Directives, (5th Ed., v. 3.0, 5 April 2007) pg. 145, http://www.jtc1sc34.org/repository/0856rev.pdf Absent such specifications, a standard is a standard in name only. A standard is intended to establish a market in standardized goods, creating economic efficiency and competition. This is perhaps most simply illustrated with weights and measures, where a pound of flour must weigh the same regardless which vendor sells the product. But we can also see it in the interoperability context, e.g., with standardized nuts, bolts, and wrenches. Absent sufficient specificity to enable and require interoperability, ODF and OOXML create technical barriers to trade rather than promoting competition. And the Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade unambiguously requires that national standardization bodies "shall ensure that technical regulations [includes international standards] are not prepared, adopted or applied with a v
  • Paul Merrell on 13 May 09
     
    (continuation). . And the Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade unambiguously requires that national standardization bodies "shall ensure that technical regulations [includes international standards] are not prepared, adopted or applied with a view to or with the effect of creating unnecessary obstacles to international trade." http://www.wto.org/english/docs_e/legal_e/17-tbt_e.htm#articleII So while I agree that linking IT systems may not invariably be the ultimate goal, sufficient specificity in an IT standard to do so is in fact a threshold user and legal requirement. Otherwise, one has vendor lock-in and definition of the standard is controlled by the vendor with the largest market share, not the standard itself. Neither ODF nor OOXML met than threshold for eligibility as international standards and still do not. In both cases, national standardization bodies voted to adopt the standards without paying heed to fundamental legal and user requirements.
Alex Brown

Moved by Freedom - Powered by Standards » Blog Archive » News of the Weird (A... - 0 views

standardsandfreedom.net/...news-of-the-weird-april-issue

shared by Alex Brown on 21 Apr 09 - No Cached
  • I just don’t get it
    • Alex Brown
      Alex Brown on 21 Apr 09
       
      Neither do I: but then this is not the first signal of a less than unanimous attitude towards document formats from the Old Firm.
  • The Durban 2 conference in Geneva makes me think of a bizarre mashup of the first Durban conference and what I experienced at the OOXML BRM
    • Alex Brown
      Alex Brown on 21 Apr 09
       
      Not the first time somebody seems to have got confused between issues of tynanny and totalitarianism, and ... document formats. What price perspective?
    • Jesper Lund Stocholm
      Jesper Lund Stocholm on 21 Apr 09
       
      Actually I didn't know Charles participated in the BRM?
    • Alex Brown
      Alex Brown on 21 Apr 09
       
      He didn't - this is something that Andy Updegrove published at the tim too. What price reality?
  • Alex is right. National transposition is a procedural relic. We should get the specs right out of software vendors and just skip this standardization crap that only justifies to pay useless consultants whose status is construed as some kind of impartial judge. This kind of failed processes have led us to believe that standards and norms could be somehow trusted; as it unfortunately turns out, it stops to be true when strongly applied pressure by one large private monopoly meets the weak morals of the ones in charge of ensuring the process is being duly respected. Thank you Alex, for spelling out the truth. Your lack of impartiality and your strange behaviour during the OOXML standardization process have clarified how poorly qualified you are at patronizing others and lecturing on the ISO and other standards bodies’ processes. I wish you good luck for your next job at Microsoft.
    • Alex Brown
      Alex Brown on 23 Apr 09
       
      Ah, the sound of a dummy being being spat out ...
Gary Edwards

Denmark: OOXML vote won't affect public sector. ODF is too costly! | InfoWorld - 0 views

www.infoworld.com/...t-Denmark-public-sector_1.html

brm denmark geneva iso msoffice odf ooxml opendocment openxml

shared by Gary Edwards on 07 Mar 08 - Cached
  • Lebech said Denmark considers OOXML an open standard, regardless whether it is approved by the ISO. "It would be impossible for us to use only ISO standards if we want to fulfill the goal of creating interoperability in the government sector," he said. The Danish Parliament also mandated that public agencies consider the cost of using open formats. One of the main reasons OOXML was included is because Denmark is heavily dependent on document management systems that are integrated with Microsoft's Office products, Lebech said. Denmark also found that requiring agencies to only use ODF would have been too expensive, mostly because of the cost of converting documents into ODF, Lebech said. "We wouldn't have been able to only support ODF," Lebech said. "It wouldn't have been cost neutral."
Gary Edwards

Word of recognition from an unexpected side: ODF editor Patrick Durusau supports OOXML... - 0 views

idippedut.dk/...n-from-an-unexpected-side.aspx

brm durusau iso oasis odf officeopenxml ooxml opendocument openxml

shared by Gary Edwards on 09 Feb 08 - Cached
  • The OpenXML project has made a large amount of progress in terms of the openness of its evelopment. Objections that do not recognize that are focusing on what they want to see and not what is actually happening with OpenXML
Gary Edwards

Harmonization and Interop: The dizzying dance of ODF, OOXML, and CDF - 0 views

digg.com/...izzying_dance_of_ODF_OOXML_CDF

cdf ibm interop oasis odf ooxml opendocument openxml uic w3c

shared by Gary Edwards on 06 Feb 08 - Cached
  • With the ISO BRM fast approaching, the harmonization of ODF and OOXML is all the rage. The legendary marbux takes on this discussion arguing that ODF and OOXML both lack the interoperability framework needed to meet ISO directives describing interop requirements. He argues that interop between MSOffice and OpenOffice can be achieved using CDF.
Gary Edwards

Microsoft's OOXML limps through ISO meeting - ZDNet UK - 0 views

news.zdnet.co.uk/...0,1000000121,39362112-2,00.htm

brm ecma geneva iso oasis odf ooxml

shared by Gary Edwards on 07 Mar 08 - Cached
  • Gary Edwards, former president of the Open Document Foundation, an industry group that promoted ODF but then rejected both approaches and closed itself down in November 2007, said: "Ecma and Oasis are vendor consortia where the rules governing standards specification work favour vendor innovation over the open and transparent interoperability consumers, governments and FLOSS efforts demand... Shutting that door on Ecma OOXML is proving very difficult exactly because the primary and fundamental rule of ISO interoperability requirements has been breached."
Gary Edwards

Open Malaysia: Geneva, Day Five - 0 views

www.openmalaysiablog.com/...geneva-day-five.html

brm geneva iso odf ooxml opendocument openxml

shared by Gary Edwards on 07 Mar 08 - Cached
  • We eventually found out that if any changes affected current implementations it would certainly be rejected. This seriously compromised any elegant solutions, and it forced us to be mindful of the "existing corpus of documents" in the wild. I personally don't believe that that should be our problem, but there was a large and vocal voting bloc which would oppose any changes to the spec which would 'break' Ecma 376. This was why appeasing Ecma had to happen. Even though they rushed their Ecma International Standard, and Microsoft took the risk in shipping Microsoft Office 2007 last year, we now have to bear the burden of having to support its limitations. This also means that future maintenance changes would get harder and harder.
Gary Edwards

ODF and OOXML are standards in name only - Google: OOXML 'insufficient and unnecessary'... - 0 views

www.zdnet.co.uk/...282-39001068c-20091889o,00.htm

brm google interop iso marbux odf ooxml opendocument openxml zdnet-uk

shared by Gary Edwards on 07 Mar 08 - Cached
  • Both ODF and OOXML flunk that test badly. Their interoperable implementation neither has nor can be demonstrated. Both are designed for the waging of feature wars, not for interoperability. Both attempt to legitimize market-leading companies embracing and extending their own formats. They are standards in name only. What we are watching is a contest to decide which big vendor formats will be allowed to undeservedly claim the title of "international standard."
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