Don't Play ... [LWN.net]

Don't Play ...

Posted Dec 9, 2006 16:52 UTC (Sat) by jhardin (guest, #3297)
In reply to: Don't Play ... by AnswerGuy
Parent article: Ecma International Approves Office Open XML as Worldwide Industry Standard

> Clearly Microsoft is trying to "game the system" by getting their proprietary data formats
> the impriatur of any recognized standards bodies.

If anything, this reduces my respect for ECMA as a standards body. What good is a standards body that can be bought off to endorse a standard that only one vendor is realistically capable of implementing?

> Most of the government IT personnel, especially at the management level
> and in the procurement process, don't want to change their products.
> They are looking for an excuse or loophole that allows them to continue working
> in the same way to which they are accustomed.

That's a very good point. We need to make sure the rules that govern their decisionmaking clearly state that, for example, file formats used to store and distribute public information must be unencumbered by patents and licensing fees and must be freely implementable by anyone *in addition to* requiring that they be endorsed by a standards body.

Write your government representative. It's going to take a lot of voices to balance the sheer power of M$' millions in bribes^Wcampaign contributions.

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Standards bodies

Posted Dec 9, 2006 18:59 UTC (Sat) by k8to (subscriber, #15413) [Link]

I think this reminds us that standards bodies are primarily about verifying things like accuracy and completeness, not so much practical issues like implementability, or viability.

There are plenty of standards ISO and ANSI publish which wither on the vine because they are nonsense. This one is a different case but similar issues apply. This type of problem is why the IETF very explicitly tried to follow a different path in their procedures.

The ECMA, ISO standards processes can be pretty useful when there are a number of participants who work to make the standard representative, and then the standards organization can stand behind it as a relatively unchanging, relatively documented work. What they don't do is tell you that the work is of good quality and serving the interests of implementors.