Microsoft's secretive standards orgs in Former Yugoslavia (LinuxWorld) [LWN.net]

Microsoft's secretive standards orgs in Former Yugoslavia (LinuxWorld)

Posted Sep 25, 2007 20:07 UTC (Tue) by asamardzic (subscriber, #27161)
Parent article: Microsoft's secretive standards orgs in Former Yugoslavia (LinuxWorld)

Was assigned to Serbian Institute for Standardization for a short timespan couple years ago, and can only confirm that this body has no resources at all to accomplish its assigned task: it's all volunteer work, the only compensation offered for examining various standard being that - eh, you have access to standard documents. I strongly suspect that nothing changed in the meantime, and that nobody actually took a look into this "standard" documentation, so that voting decision is made completely at random (I wouldn't exclude conspiracy/corruption theories alleged by above article, but having in mind how undeveloped and MS-uniform is local IT community, I wouldn't be surprised if decision is made solely by some small bureaucrat, out of pure MS==GOOD inertia).

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Microsoft's secretive standards orgs in Former Yugoslavia (LinuxWorld)

Posted Sep 25, 2007 21:32 UTC (Tue) by deweerdt (subscriber, #18159) [Link]

>"I wouldn't be surprised if decision is made solely by some small
> bureaucrat, out of pure MS==GOOD inertia"

Yep: "Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence." -- Napoleon

Microsoft's secretive standards orgs in Former Yugoslavia (LinuxWorld)

Posted Sep 26, 2007 11:03 UTC (Wed) by MathFox (subscriber, #6104) [Link]

I can tell you that in many of the "more developed" nations membership of the standards organisations is an unpaid activity and the membership fee is a barrier for interested individuals.
I know in more detail of the situation in the Netherlands; a NEN membership is ~2500 euro/year. Technical committee members are volunteers, usually sponsored by their employers. (Yes, early access to standards and influence in standard setting is worth something.) The NEN has a secretariat that gives administrative and logistic support (nice!) but doesn't have technical knowledge.

The whole process would have worked fine with a smaller standard (500 pages can be reasonably reviewed in a few months) and if the Microsoft representative hadn't blocked the (under Dutch rules) required consensus.