Artificially limiting the debate in Microsoft's favor [LWN.net]

Artificially limiting the debate in Microsoft's favor

Posted Nov 27, 2007 18:56 UTC (Tue) by stevenj (guest, #421)
In reply to: Erosion of trust by jdub
Parent article: The GNOME Foundation on OOXML

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.

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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.