Re: [Fsfe-uk] Microsoft Office OpenXML (OOXML) - last few days

[Ian Lynch]

On Sat, 2007-06-23 at 18:16 +0100, Philip Hunt wrote:
>  way and not another?
> >
> > They will certainly have been lobbied hard by M$.
> 
> Does "lobbied hard" imply money changing hands? (I have an image of
> brown paper envelopes but I'm sure it wasn't that crude). Exactly what
> pressure could/did MS bring to bear?

Does it matter? We will probably never know. What we are able to do is
respond and if its not corrupt we might get a result, if it is we might
embarrass them and get a result anyway. We might not. That is a risk we
have to take.

> > They have to go
> > through the procedures to be seen to be fair so what they are doing is
> > not too surprising. What matters is that there are a lot of informed
> > reasons from a wide range of people and organisations as to why it is
> > not in the public interest to make OOXML an ISO standard.
> >
> > Your argument above would be fine but it needs to be on their form and
> > give some evidence and detail about things like being partially secret,
> > patent encumbered etc.
> 
> Well I had a look at their form and it really doesn't seem relevant.

So do your best to make it relevant. All bureaucracies work like this.
Its no good saying we don't like the rules if the only way to be heard
is to adhere to the rules. If an exam asks about apples and you write
about oranges you ain't going to get any marks.

> In any case, shouldn't a standards organisation be using standard
> formats (such as ISO/IEC 26300:2006) instead of non-standard ones? I
> think I will write in my submission that I don't have any software
> that produces the non-standard format they want but do have software
> that produces ODF, if they'd like a word-processed file instead of
> text.  :-)

I think that point is worth making but ideally we need a variety of
approaches from a range of people and organisations.

> BTW, did you mean to send this just to me, or to the list?

Probably the list :-)

Ian
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