Michael Dolan Dot Com

Tuesday, August 28th, 2007

Slashdot: “Microsoft Bought Sweden’s ISO Vote on OOXML?”

It’s not often that I point to /. as a source, but this seems warranted (see post below).

How long will the world allow this to happen? At what expense does this come for the integrity and viability of international standards organizations - especially the one named ISO?

What if Vanderbilt could have standardized railroad tracks according to his own, proprietary, patented rail size and shape - would the US have prospered as it did? Most people don’t really care about standards - it’s often like the legal world where people say, “Just let the experts fight it out and come back to me with your answer.” But that’s not what’s happening here - in this case it’s not experts debating the merits of a standard - you’re looking at one company trying to lock the world into a lifetime payment plan under the guise of an open standard.

It’s time to get loud.

http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/08/28/1237255

The vote on OOXML looked fairly secured. Most in the Working Group in Sweden was against the vote to approve OOXML. The day of the vote, though, more companies showed up at the door. Some 20 new companies — each one payed about $2500 to be allowed to vote — and vote they did … for Microsoft. Most of the new companies were partners from Microsoft who suddenly out of the blue joined the Working Group, payed membership fees and voted yes for approval. From the OS2World story: ‘The final result was 25 Yes, 6 No and 3 Abs and this would from the start be a done deal of saying No! Jonas Bosson who participated in today’s meeting on behalf on FFII said that he left the meeting in protest and so did also IBM’s Swedish local representative Johan Westman.’”