Erosion of trust [LWN.net]

Erosion of trust

Posted Nov 26, 2007 19:16 UTC (Mon) by stevenj (guest, #421)
In reply to: Erosion of trust by jdub
Parent article: The GNOME Foundation on OOXML

I totally understand that, and you'll find that almost all GNOME contributors are politically against OOXML -- but that has no bearing on the ISO decision. In fact, the more "political" we are, the more Microsoft can say that we're politicising the process... and that has done quite a bit of damage already. We need to aim for the absolute rout of OOXML on technical grounds, without all the shrill voices and politicisation. It doesn't make us look good, and it is not at all convincing as part of the process.

Your underlying assumption seems to be that "politics" is bad, and only "technical" discussions are good or appropriate. But politics (from the Greek πoλιτικα, "civic affairs") is simply the process of diverse interests trying to decide on common policy for the common good. The whole question of choosing an international standard is intrinsically a "political" process. It is nonsensical to deride those you disagree with as "political" and "politicizing the process".

With OOXML, as with any standards, the fundamental question is: does annointing this as an international standard serve the public interest? Will making it a "standard" improve interoperability and hence spur competition and communications?

This is not solely a question of whether the OOXML specification, considered in a vacuum, is an adequate technical description of a particular format. The context is also important: the fact that ISO has already recently standardized a document format for essentially the same task means that adding a second format, rather than attempting to fix any deficiencies in the first, will further splinter the market. It will force governments, companies, and vendors to support both formats and will reward Microsoft for ignoring what the rest of the world already agreed upon—an approach that is certain to have repercussions on future standards efforts (e.g. PDF vs. Silverlight).

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Erosion of trust

Posted Nov 26, 2007 19:31 UTC (Mon) by jdub (subscriber, #27) [Link]

Your underlying assumption seems to be that "politics" is bad, and only "technical" discussions are good or appropriate.

Not on the whole. The political issues at stake are incredibly important -- I absolutely understand that (being a contributor to the FLOSS community for many years now, it is part of who I am). Microsoft are doing this to king-hit their competitors, most importantly to us, FLOSS.

But: Few of those issues are relevant to the ISO process. That is what I am referring to when saying that the politics are not productive. Microsoft gets to cry "zealot" when we attack OOXML on political grounds, we should not let them manipulate the process this way, on top of all the other ways they've done so already.

I am of a similar opinion to you. I don't want to see OOXML as an ISO standard. What I have been talking about in this thread is the method by which we fight it. I do understand the context of the battlefield.

Artificially limiting the debate in Microsoft's favor

Posted Nov 27, 2007 18:56 UTC (Tue) by stevenj (guest, #421) [Link]

But: Few of those issues are relevant to the ISO process.

To the extent that this is true, we should be vigorously pressing ISO (whose motto is "One standard, one test" after all) to acknowledge that they are relevant.

It seems to me that you've fallen hook, line, and sinker for Microsoft's main tactic to limit the debate: they want to exclude all consideration of whether ISO should have two incompatible standards for office-type documents (which is really the most serious objection to OOXML), and instead focus on extremely narrow technical questions. In much the same way, they reduced the "contradictions" phase of the process to the meaningless criterion that two standards only "contradict" one another if they cannot physically coexist on the same computer.

This is very similar, by the way, to how Microsoft tries to limit the debate about using free/open-source software in government procurement policies. In their "software choice" campaign, they insist that the procurement criteria be artificially limited to price and technical fitness for a short-term task—hoping you'll ignore the fact that vendor-independence, transparency, etcetera are also merits that can and should be taken into account.

Artificially limiting the debate in Microsoft's favor

Posted Nov 27, 2007 19:10 UTC (Tue) by jdub (subscriber, #27) [Link]

To the extent that this is true, we should be vigorously pressing ISO (whose motto is "One standard, one test" after all) to acknowledge that they are relevant.

That motto was used in 2002 and is not relevant to ISO's processes. There are plenty of ISO standards that cover the same ground. The crucial point is that they don't conflict with each other, and generally build upon standards that have gone before.

So let's not argue OOXML on these grounds. They're just irrelevant. The one area this might work for is us that OOXML reimplements absolutely everything and doesn't build on existing standards (ODF uses things like SVG, etc), but attack it under the terms defined by ISO.

I'm not falling for anything -- I'm certainly not falling for some of the uninformed but popular opinions about these things in the FLOSS community.