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Below the navel there is neither religion nor truth - Italian proverb
Unix beardies get legal over OOXML
THE UK'S open source community is preparing its challenge to the approval last week of Microsoft's OOXML as an international document standard.
the UK Unix and Open Systems User Group (UKUUG) has sought the advice of a barrister over whether it can mount a legal challenge to a British Standards Institute decision to approve the Microsoft standard. It has also written to the BSI asking for an explanation.
Alain Williams, chairman of the UKUUG, said there were still so many holes in OOXML that the BSI's decision to support it in a vote of the International Standards Organisation (ISO) last week could not be justified.
The BSI's supporting vote had run against the advice of its own technical committee, he said. The UKUUG was exploring whether it could press for a judicial review of the BSI decision.
The BSI said it supported OOXML at the recommendation of its committee.
Williams said the ISO vote had been won with a minority of votes.
Microsoft got approval with 75 per cent of votes cast. But, said Williams, there
were more abstentions than votes.
The ISO refused to publish the details of the vote.
Europe's competition watchdog said in September that it expected the ISO should be committed to transparency in its decision making process, as set out in European rules on horizontal co-operation agreements.
It since opened an official investigation into the ISO decision to support OOXML as part of its ongoing interest in how Microsoft might restrict interoperability using its market muscle.
The Danish Unix User group has also filed a complain to the EC's competition watchdog over its national approval of OOXML, the Norwegian National Standards Institute filed a complaint to the ISO and the Mayor of Munich complained to his own Federal government that approval of the standard would restrict competition and hinder international efforts to make interoperability an everyday working reality with the ISO-approved Open Document Format.
It has been reported that 87 countries of a possible 157 countries voted on whether OOXML should be approved as an international standard. Just 16 of the 87 registered abstentions. The ICO said it might be the case that the other 70 countries were simply not required to vote.
Microsoft was unavailable for comment.
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Why was no one every quite this pissy about MS's old formats: .doc, .xls, and .ppt. All these formats are ACTUALLY closed formats. OOXML may not be perfect, but it's better than the old closed ones. 

I just can't understand why everyone is all upset over these questionably open formats and ignoring the UNquestionably closed ones.

Oh well. Let's just keep poking the bear...
Dan
Microsoft is not trying to approve .doc, .xls and .ppt format as ISO standards, therefore who cares. 
The protests are against approval of the "non-perfect" (as you said) format OOXML as an ISO standard, since it has some issues preventing it to be called truly open ISO standard. 

So we need to fight as much as we can against the approval of the questionable format, and only after Microsoft will fix it, (to make true OPEN standard and not the "description" of how MS Office will save the documents) it could be considered as the contender for the ISO approval. 

And on philosophical note - MS Office is a very good cash cow for MS. Who want to kill the goose which brings golden eggs? Microsoft will do anything, including dirty tricks to avoid making truly open ISO standard out of OOXML. 

They are official monopoly which tries to pedal their lock-in formats as the international standard.

I hope that ISO body will reverse their politically influenced, lobbied decision on OOXML format, otherwise we will have A LOT of legal fights everywhere against ISO local bodies. 
And eventually MS will loose the battle anyway, they are SCO or IBM (whichever you like) of 21st century in my humble opinion.
The answer is people don't want just another 'UNquestionably closed' format... It's good to see people don't forget so easy ;)
Dan,
perhaps we aren't getting pissy about the old closed formats because, if memory serves, NONE of them were ever put forth as INTERNATIONAL STANDARDS. They were merely the data output files of a set of proprietary programs, and were only guaranteed to work with the same version of that proprietary program that they were written with (and at times, even that compatibility was questionable). There was no guarantee that they would or should work with any non-MS software. However, as part of being a STANDARD, OOXML should work with any software for which the software producer cares to write import and export utilities, and the specifications of the OOXML standard detail the manner in which OOXML is to be used.
But at its heart, the OOXML debate is not about data file formats or standards. It is about money. Specifically, the money that Microsoft would lose by having their old, closed, proprietary formats excluded from large and lucrative government contracts. OOXML is Microsoft's half-hearted attempt at being "open"-enough that they can scream loudly when government bodies (ie - Massachusetts) declare MSOffice to be unfit for public use.
.doc, .xls and .ppt are not ISO standards but defacto standards. No one ever got to vote on them and they have not been certified as standards. Many people are not happy with those closed standards hence the need for MS to go to the ISO, hat in hand, volish trickery under hat.

How OOXML is better than the former MS formats is unclear to me. Because they are calling it "open'? That's like MS "open-sauce", a fine blend of poor programming, deceit and plenty of money to corrupt the corruptible.
With enough money you can get anything passed. Sad, yes. 

But really if Open Office can catch up to MS Office feature and performance-wise, then they will win and odf will win. If these people were more worried about their product and less worried about a half-open standard..... well who knows.
BSI is an Institution, not an Institute. Also, you don't need the "the". I used to edit standards there, so I should know.