Somebody in the ISO must care?
You will be familiar by now about the ongoing saga of Ecma-376. No? Read some of my earlier posts and google for blogs about OOXML or Ecma-376 or ODF and such like.
Ecma-376 is a legitimised published specification of Microsoft’s OOXML (Office Open XML) document format that was introduced with their Office 2007 application suite. They have requested (paid?) Ecma to represent the specification through the national and international standards’ bodies for fast track approval, despite it being over 6000 pages in length!) as an International Standard.
There have been many hundreds of technical criticisms made, and flaws with the specification identified that make it hard to see how it could ever become such a standard. In mine and others’ blogging about this, there have been many questions raised about the way in which national standards bodies are being “manouvered” into voting in a positive, or just benign, manner when the technical issues raised would have usually caused the vote to be a resounding no.
Tonight I found this excellent summary of the rather suspicious and unusual voting patterns that have taken place and been recorded so far. It really stinks…..
The other place of regularly updated record on this subject is at noooxml.org.
As I have said before, please don’t buy any more M$ products. Don’t even pirate their stuff. You will lose control of YOUR data, unless you sign an irrevocable, never-ending exclusive license – a bit like doing a deal with the devil…. Don’t say you haven’t been warned.
