- Thursday, 12 November 2009
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Gerrymander: To re-draw the boundaries of districts to give a party an undue advantage
UK unix beardies appeal for $cash
THE UK UNIX USER Group may have to drop its legal challenge to Microsoft's controversial international document standard because it doesn't have the money to see it through.
On Thursday, Britain's High Court refused the UK Unix User Group's (UKUUG's) application for a judicial review into the UK's endorsement of Microsoft's application for its OOXML document standard to get an international certification.
Alain Williams, chairman of the UKUUG, said the group had grounds to resubmit its application because the court had been mistaken to reject it.
However, he said the UKUUG didn't have enough money to cover the costs of its action, which was a request that the High Court consider that the British Standards Institution (BSI) had no grounds to vote in support of Microsoft at the International Standards Organisation.
"We are casting about for a sugar daddy," said Williams.
Mr Justice Lloyd Jones rejected the UKUUG's application for a judicial review last Thursday, giving the group until the break of dawn this Friday to raise a legal fund for an appeal.
"This application does not disclose any arguable breach of the procedures of BSI or of rules of procedural fairness," said Justice Jones on Thursday.
"In any event, the application is academic in light of the adoption of the new standard by ISO," he added.
But the UKUUG said today the judge got in wrong on both counts. OOXML had not been ratified as a standard, it had merely been put on the fast track to certification.
Moreover, since the UKUUG applied to the court, it has emerged that there has been an unprecedented flurry of national appeals against the ISO decision to back Microsoft. Brazil, India, South Africa and Venezuela all appealed the ISO decision, effectively stalling the ratification of OOXML as an international standard.
"The decision to publish or not ISO/IEC DIS 29500 as an ISO/IEC Internatio nal Standard cannot be taken until the outcome of the appeals is known," said an ISO statement on Thursday. 29500 refers to Microsoft's standard.
Williams said there was still a case for the UKUUG's appeal on the grounds that there had been "procedural irregularities" in the BSI's decision to back OOXML. The BSI had supported the Microsoft standard after clearing a consensus vote in its favour among members. The UKUUG told the court there had been no consensus because one member, IBM's Ian Larner, had abstained after long opposition to OOXML's ratification.
Williams said the UKUUG may need as much as £50,000 to see its appeal through. µ
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S--t talks, money walks. Micr0$ucks will get their way simply because they can outlast anyone when it comes to spending money and shoving their will down people's throats. Don't like what we're doing? Tough - sue us.

Jim
UNIX in Todays World is Real Code. Not Erector Set, Handy Andy Code.Nor
Lots of Specialty Server Hardware complete code systems that exist & rate: So What.

Theres aLota of Code, in general, Cobol C++ being base or write Your Own. yet from practical, nationwide, Runs Entire system Correctly Code:UNIX.Quydea Mess without UNIX.

Everything from Microsoft is converted to M/S Playtime, Barbie Doll GI Joe Pretend Software. Its readily Available & often demos free & is Stable. it also runs on Standardly available Hardware ,too. In Fact with enough Translation software , plug in chip/boards, anything can go just about anywhere. Microsoft has gotten idea that theres certain easeibility is minimun.Good.
Seems funny Unix would appeal to charity like funding.Seems NON Professional threat or beginner like.Result is No Ones Intrested, Unix works & expands & life carries on.
Drashek

Even if it's paid in US dollars by only US citizens(No, I'm not saying that's what's going to happen), that is a low price to keep Microsoft out.

I have $50 for them if they go the donations route.
Go here to make a donation.

http://www.ukuug.org/payment/

I put 'OOXML action' for the reason.
All this resistance against OOXML seems to be trying to force MS to do ODF instead. Microsoft stated that ODF did not provide full coverage of Office features even to Office 2003, let alone new features in Office 2007. They were never, ever going to choose ODF. Even extending ODF, which they were not allowed to do, would be a weak solution: ODF simply requires more characters to represent the same document. OK, it's compressed, but the uncompressed text has to be processed when loading and saving.

Your choice was: accept some kind of standard and influence over Word's file format, or reject it and have no influence over OOXML. Neither option will give you Word using ODF by default. I don't see that having two standards for word processing documents is a big problem; we have multiple standards for different representations of programs (C, C++, Ada, etc, etc).

I was unsurprised to see criticism that Office 2007 does not meet the ISO OOXML standard. Of course it doesn't. Office 2007 was released long before the changes from ISO committee members. Your article is incorrect, by the way; the standard has been approved, that's what they're fighting against. 'Fast-Track' simply means that ECMA presented a fully-drafted standard to ISO for approval, rather than the multiple stages of inventing and drafting that for example C++ has had. There was ample opportunity for revision in ECMA - the process started in December 2005.

This is only coming about because some people - who seem largely to be Anything But Microsoft - don't like the outcome.
It seems that UKUUG confuse consensus with unanimity.

From the ISO/IEC JCT1 directives:

Note: Consensus is defined as general agreement, characterised by the absence of sustained opposition to substantial
issues by any important part of the concerned interests and by a process that involves seeking to take into account the views
of all parties concerned and to reconcile any conflicting arguments. Consensus need not imply unanimity. (ISO/IEC Guide
2:1996)]