Political vs. Technical Arguments

Posted Nov 26, 2007 19:06 UTC (Mon) by grouch (guest, #27289) [Link]

Excuse me? Read the statement! We are nowhere near apologising for Microsoft's scandalous corruption of the ISO process. We raised this issue explicitly in our statement.

You're excused. I did read the statement, including the bizarre bit about "FLOSS implementations of OOXML". (What makes this bizarre is the fact that the specification for MSOOXML is so non-specific; see, for example, WordProcessing ML -- unspecified application behavior).

The 5th point in the "Position" section of the GNOME Foundation statement chastises "community" for the erosion of trust in the standards process and thereby transfers blame from the victimizer, Microsoft, to the victims. You are apologizing for Microsoft's corruption of the process and blaming those who exposed that corruption for the resultant erosion of trust. The process did not anticipate the calculated, deliberate attempts to subvert it which Microsoft used. To borrow the characterization from the GNOME statement, this most certainly is a "black and white" issue, or, more correctly, a good versus evil issue, in that a single vendor has and is attempting to subvert what is supposed to be a global consensus-building process into a means "to control and restrain" any who seek to extricate themselves or their data from utter dependency upon that single vendor.

By seeking the impossible goal of "FLOSS implementations of [MS]OOXML" at a time when there is only one partial implementation of that format, very few documents existing with even that partial implementation, and no established dependency upon that partial implementation yet, GNOME is assisting in creating a dependency on that as-yet deviation from standards and thereby undermining global efforts to produce a document format by true consensus.