NoOOXML

Any evidence about the Finish change of mind?

I did have a link to Finland's statement to that "no" position being reached two days after the ballot closed, but now I can't find it, it seems to have disappeared. Perhaps it was wrong. I have edited my statement above to be safe.

There is actually nothing unusual about this particular decision. A ballot resolution process is normally initiated when there are technical comments. This is standard procedure regardless of whether the first vote fails or passes. The difference here is that the amount of comments is huge. There are thousands of comments to resolve in a document of 6000 pages, compared to the more typical amount of a dozen or so comments on a document of a few hundred pages in total.

The sheer volume of the document and its many serious problems could perhaps motivate a decision by the ISO secretariat to cancel the project now, but that would require them to stick out their neck in an unexpected manner. A decision to cancel a DIS is normally taken later by the sub-committee handling the ballot resolution process, in this case SC34. Furthermore, the project editor has said that ECMA and Microsoft will work with SC34 to try to resolve the comments in just a few months, and the ISO secretariat has no real authority to step in and cancel the project against the will of the appointed project editor. SC34 has that authority, but they haven't even started their work on the comments yet.

The ISO secretariat allowed DIS 29500 to be put on fast track in the first place. While this was clearly a mistake, we now have to see it through to the end in February. Formally, this is normal procedure. It's just that the draft standard being considered here is abnormal.

The difference here is that the amount of comments is huge.

Allthough he total number might be huge the number of identical comments might be huge too. For instance IBM that produced most comments submitted a lot of similar comments in most of the committees they participated in.

So 10k comments might easily shrivle to 2k non-identical and even to a few hundred of really distiguishable comments.

There are several countries that have put a lot of people to work in analyzing the specification and they have produced their own and so original comments. Check the work done in France or UK for example. And it was a real pity that the 500 comments from US didn't entered in time. Also the ones from Holland. That people invested a lot of time in the specification.

Finally, check that the first people that analyzed the specification, indeed when it was just MS-OOXML posted at ECMA committee, was the people of the OpenDocument Fellowship. Their work can be found in Groklaw and this work has served as a base for IBM and many others to make their comments.

Please, don't simplify: IBM has been only one more of the entities that have produced comments. Indeed they have produced only 200 comments and surely no more than 100 of them have entered in the votes (the other 100 came really late…)

Sorry for rant, but Microsoft actions gets my blood boiling.

It upsets me too, rather a lot actually, but please try to keep calm. You think a lot better when you are not angry, and we need to stay smart to have any chance against these large scale bullying tactics. Letting out steam in public feels good sometimes, I know, but it gets us nowhere. The bullies might be stronger, but I wouldn't bet they are smarter than us if we take care to really use our brains. If nothing else, at least we stand a good chance of outnumbering them, as those 42,000 names in the petition indicate. We are being bullied, yes, but we have a lot of honest and smart people on our side who are willing to stand up and take the fight. We are still in a fairly good position to defend ourselves and fight back, and this fight is far from hopeless.