Standards are a means to rapidly create and control a global market. Therefore global companies are quite active in launching standardization initiatives.

scary - very scary - guess we should turn to the doj for help - oh nevermind.

I have two questions:
1) The voting rules don't sound strange anymore. 50-50 for or against DIS 29500 is correct. One little thing. In Switzerland, if the votes are equal, one stays with the actual state (Ständemehr as an example). This is how our democratic system works. Why is there a >= 50% for a APPROVE with comments instead of a >50%?

2) The initial posting accuses you to block the discussion of the economic, legal and technical flaws of DIS 29500. That's hard to understand. Would you like to write your understanding of the situtation?

In many countries you can't "promisse not to sue", because suing is a right that the law garantees for everyone - so you can't "quit your rights" just because you said it.

In short: if they change their minds sometime in the future, they will be able to sue.

This voting rule contains an "a priori" choice which has to be contradicted?!! Is this balanced or biased?

If this goes forward Mr Hans-Rudolf Thomann will have a hard time restoring his credibility.

I wrote him:

• that there is already an ISO standard for the file format of office applications;
• that the industry and customers will be confused, if there are two standards with nearly the same scope;
• that a "DiSAPPROVE with comments" will force the lobby around OOXML to commit their knowledge to improve the existing standard.

As polite as I can write ;)

There are no legal problems with the Open Specification Promise. My wife is a lawyer and she explained it to me. So we don't need to discuss this here. Next point.

(1) It was evident from the "Tagung Fuer Informatik und Recht" held in
Bern (24.10.06) that there are quite strong currents towards Open Source
and general openness of information and its retention. The arguments
were pragmatic, driven by interoperability needs. However, the legal
profession has another trait which has not often been addressed: it does
NOT like change. Hence, forcing the legal profession to change how it
works every 2..3 years by releasing a new version of MS Office does not
compare to the relatively stable "learn it once" interface that
OpenOffice.org offers - not to mention that OpenOffice.org is free and
less prone to virus infections.

(2) Archiving will be at risk with OOXML. It does NOT offer full
specification, as it includes referral to external specifications which
are not publicly available (and could thus be rewritten later without
affecting the "Standards" status). OOXML has been independently produced
by a formally convicted monopolist who even now has EU punishments
pending for failing to comply with court demands for openness ("SMB
specifications"). One could call this a deficient track record.

ODF, by its nature, allows the use of open and/or alternative software
that can be inspected for information leaks. The events at Crypto AG
<http://biphome.spray.se/laszlob/cryptoag/crypto_ag.htm> show that such
inspection may indeed be desirable for government and legal use.
Indeed, in more secure environments the use of OpenOffice.org software
has increased just because of that inspection ability, and its
aforementioned lower sensitivity to virus infections.

(3) OOXML is a specification by one company only. ODF is defined by a
consortium and put in practical use by Open Software communities - and
accepted as EU standard. ODF is also the default file format in most
charitable offerings such as the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project and
the school project in the Spanish Extremadura region. In other words,
it has had real world exposure, use and correction. OOXML is too new to
be trusted, and certainly too new to be then voted as a formal standard
with wide ranging economic and social impact. OOXML could only ever be
considered viable if it had as many years 'in the field' as ODF and
could demonstrate cross-vendor interoperability.

(4) OOXML has extreme deficiencies in the way it handles mathematics
(see <http://www.robweir.com/blog/2007/07/formula-for-failure.html> for
a sample analysis). For a nation whose technology exports are renowned
for world leading precision this should raise questions. Flaws like
this have the potential to lead to economic damage even more than the
lock-in to one provider, and may only have emerged as a result of the
pressure for openness - we will never know if these are new problems or
are exposures of existing ones.

I would recommend to address the Swiss vote with care. The extreme
lobbying is an indication that the arguments for and against a specific
choice have to be very clear to avoid the impression of supplier induced
bias. The focus has to be Swiss interests, none other. As someone who
has worked with automated, policy and secure environments I know at both
a tactical and strategic level what works, and what causes (usually
costly) problems long term.

No decision should ever be taken by a vendor.

He is probably a Microsoft fellow, as he lists .NET as a special interest on xing.com and has a contact there to Microsoft Schweiz GmbH.

I dont't think that he acts in a bad faith - but perhaps ignorance. That would explain, why he tries to raise a de facto standard of a monopoly to an international standard. And that is a common procedure.

Just yesterday I was sitting in the relevant meeting of SNV/UK14 (http://www.snv.ch/), that decides how Switzerland will vote. The chairman (Hans-Rudolf Thomann) explained the following rules:
- we are here to create standards, not to reject them
- if we reach consensus (>=75%) to vote for Microsoft, we will vote for Microsoft
- if we only reach a majority (>=50%) to vote for Microsoft, we will vote for Microsoft
- if we reach a majority to vote against Microsoft, we will vote for Microsoft
- if we reach consensus to vote against Microsoft, we will abstain

The present spin doctors of Microsoft and ECMA managed to convince Mr. Thomann to reject every serious technical and general concern we had regarding OOMXL by pointing to compatibility reasons. At the end we had a majority _against_ Microsoft but which (giving the unfair rules) results in a Swiss vote _for_ Microsoft. Mr. Thomann was fretting and fuming at the end of the meeting how it can be that successful international companies (we had representatives from IBM, Google, …) vote against the best interest of their customers and theirself!

Yes, this is how the democratic system at SNV / ISO works. After the meeting I could not eat as much as I wanted to puke…

Posted as AC for obvious reasons