OOXML approved as an ISO standard [LWN.net]

OOXML approved as an ISO standard

Posted Apr 2, 2008 19:16 UTC (Wed) by alecs1 (guest, #46699)
Parent article: OOXML approved as an ISO standard

If anyone is interested, I have a link on how voting took place in Romania:
http://aranea.zuavra.net/index.php/97/
This guy details the voting process. In short, half the 27 members of the comitee joined ASRO
(The Romanian Standardization Association) in the last minute, and 10 of them voted yes. Most
of these late guys are very small companies with products based entirely on Microsoft
technologies. 
From the 15, 6 members were only made public in the day of the vote. 
The results were: 15 pro, 6 against, 5 abstained.

With the previous ocasion, *after* voting the comitee took a few minutes to actually discuss
what they voted, one of the pro voters said: "hey, this standard has references to things that
are not standard, we standardise, but no really";.

I don't know about other countries, but I wouldn't expect any vertebral column from a comitee
based in Romania of these times.

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You think THIS is weird?

Posted Apr 2, 2008 21:04 UTC (Wed) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

Apparently Russia is using "silent vote": if technical specialists say nothing (for example because they had no time or were unable to reach consensus or even if they ignored issue completely) clerks automatically send "YES" vote to ISO. This is what happened with OOXML, but apparently this is NOT new procedure invented for OOXML. With rules like this it's a wonder that ISO creates usable specifications from time to time...

OOXML cast a light on ISO's work - and it's NOT pretty. Lot's of rules, but no real substance. Even before Microsoft's manipulations. Why do we trust this organization at all?