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Groklaw - Expect a 2nd Official Complaint — Against UK’s OOXML Vote
The ISO has yet to put out an official announcement, but that article leaks the “news” that OOXML has “passed” and Microsoft, which yesterday said it wouldn’t saying anything until OSI did “out of respect for the standards process” today put out a confirmation statement (”there is overwhelming support for OOXML”) anyway. I wouldn’t say overwhelming support, exactly. Some would call it overwhelmingly appalling. Michael Leenaars of OpenDoc Society says “This must be one of the worst results ever for a standard to pass within ISO/JTC1 in years.”
Oh, and the man who more than anyone seems to have made it happen would prefer that we not hate him for it. Or I think that’s what his list is saying. Here’s the question I’d like to ask Patrick Durusau: did Microsoft make any threats that unless you supported OOXML they’d fight against the next version of ODF but that if you’d scratch their back, they’d scratch yours? If so, you should tell someone. Like the EU Commission, for instance.
So far as I can tell, this is not an April Fools’ day joke.
According to reports (1,2, 3) from the European and technical press, Microsoft has succeeded in reversing an earlier vote rejecting a proposed standard on data formats called OOXML. The voting is by the International Organization for Standards, known as the ISO.
This is not just a technical issue. Microsoft uses its effective control over the OOXML standard to continue its monopolistic dominance of software applications for word processing, spreadsheets and presentation graphics. Our statement on the ISO/OOXML vote is here.
James Love is the Director of Knowledge Ecology International, a non-government organization with offices in Washington, DC, London and Geneva.
The final vote will be tallied today, but by most counts, Microsoft got enough votes for OOXML to pass. Until the official report, we have plenty of articles to read about how things went on Friday, and quite a few people in agreement that OOXML standard will tarnish ISO.
Groklaw covers what it calls “irregularities” in the voting process in Germany, Norway, and Croatia: » Read more
Where have all the emails gone?
A few weeks ago, I blogged about the US Congressional hearings related to e-mail retention at the White House. The House oversight committee hearing was the latest chapter in a saga of technical ineptitude, political intrigue, and hidden agendas. It wasn’t entirely surprising to see politicians (and competitors) try to point fingers elsewhere, anything to try to explain why a potential five million e-mails are lost…and those are just the ones that passed through the official White House e-mail system.
Rob Weir has a great objective comparison of ODF and OOXML. He created word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation graphics, each in OOXML and ODF formats. He presents a table comparing how each of the formats treated the very simple request for red, right-aligned text. Weir concludes:
The results speak for themselves.
What is the engineering justification for this horror? I have no doubt that this accurately reflects the internals of Microsoft Office, and shows how these three applications have been developed by three different, isolated teams. But is this a suitable foundation for an International Standard? Does this represent a reasonable engineering judgment? ODF uses the W3C’s XSL-FO vocabulary for text styling, and uses this vocabulary consistently. OOXML’s representation, on the other hand, appear incompatible with any deliberate design methodology.
More shenanigans.
I am just amazed and shocked by the depths to which Microsoft is willing to descend. I have had the privilege of representing Red Hat and the Indian open source community on the LITD 15 committee and have attended almost all the meetings convened on OOXML over the last one year. I would therefore like to place on record my appreciation for the Bureau of Indian Standards and Mrs. Neeta Verma for the transparency and openness with which they conducted an exceptionally difficult task. The manner in which they conducted the proceedings has done India proud and is in stark contrast to the controversies surrounding committees reviewing OOXML in other countries.
Open Source India: India votes NO for OOXML
After a colossal amount of debate and discussion over the last one year, India has finally voted NO for OOXML. Today the committee was asked “Should India change its September 2007 No vote into Yes?”
13 members voted No
5 members (including Microsoft, of course) voted Yes.
1 member abstained
3 did not attend
Shadowman and his minions are sorely sad to lose one of our role models, who said things like this, and better, pretty much all the time:
“If we have learned one thing from the history of invention and discovery, it is that, in the long run–and often in the short one–the most daring prophecies seem laughably conservative.” - Arthur C. Clarke
Interesting. They don’t address software patents exclusively, but it illuminates the growing gap between the intent and purpose of patent law and the reality of it.
Patent Law Blog (Patently-O): The Costs and Benefits of Patents to Innovators
We conclude with three important notes. First, patents do provide profits for their owners, so it makes sense for firms to get them. But taking the effect of other firms’ patents into account, including the risk of litigation, the average public firm outside the chemical and pharmaceutical industries would be better off if patents did not exist. Second, our best evidence relates to the eighties and nineties, but the evidence we have for this decade suggests that the patent tax has grown with the continued growth of patent lawsuits. We find no offsetting evidence that patents have become substantially more valuable in this century. Third, we find that small publicly traded firms get small positive R&D incentives from patents. This is also very likely to be true for small, non-publicly traded firms and non-profit inventors.
This is a real shame. Patent Troll Tracker was a great blog that did most of my work for me. Quite a loss.
The Daily Journal’s Tuesday edition (not linkable) reports that Troll Tracker author Rick Frenkel, and his employer Cisco, have been sued for defamation by two East Texas attorneys who are players in that district’s patent litigation scene, Eric Albritton and T. John Ward, Jr.
John “Johnny” Ward, Jr. is a Texas lawyer who has filed a large number of patent infringement lawsuits in recent years. Between January and mid-October of 2007, his name was attached to 54 separate lawsuits by my count; in all but four, he represented the plaintiff. He is also, as I reported in October, the son of Judge T. John Ward, the judge who is largely responsible for making the Eastern District of Texas a hotspot for patent litigation.
There’s a lot more on this, here.
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