OOXML ISO standard... No, it's april 3rd

Of all the sadistic April fools I have read this one is the one I really hoped to be a prank (on the contrary I was really looking forward to the Virgin-Google Joint venture for Mars colonization).

Instead it was not an innocent prank (I still hope that everything I read around is just a colossal April 1st leftover but I have a terrible feeling about this), OOXML is now an acknowledged ISO standard.


I don't want to delve in the tortuous technical arguments that have already been pointed out to demonstrate how this is a very bad news for the users but there is a single piece of reasoning that I'd like to share with my 3 readers (2 of them are actually indexing bots but I love them nonetheless).

What, in the name of everything is good and transparent, leads a major company (thus we will assume that they are not entirely stupid) to fight to the point of telling lies and bribing judges, to impose another standard format when there is already a fully functional, open and widely used one?



Let me make an example with something different: it is like if I invented another format for, say, television images. Now we have PAL and SECAM, both perfectly working, and widely used (honestly I don't know if HDTV is a different standard or just a different use of the old ones, but it does not matter for the example). One day my quasi-monopolistic TV making company decides that in order to consolidate my endangered monopoly offer a better service I want another standard that is open enough for people to use it but closed enough for me to be the only one to truly capitalize on its potential. What happens? Nobody will accept my "standard"... unless I make it worth their while wink wink. OK, now that the pesky bureaucrats are settled here is what the TV market will look like:

-thanks to my mastery of the new "standard" I can have good performance with it (or at least enough to offer to the marketing guys some leverage)

- thanks to my gargantuan and overfed marketing department The new "standard" sells well and all the more or less independent 3^rd party makers have to support it if they want to sell their products (alas, would you REALLY buy a TV that does not even support $new_useless_standard?! How do you think you can impress your friends if it doesn't???)

- for some mysterious reason my TVs have better images, not that my competitors do not work, they are just fine but you know... there's something, a shining my TVs have, but this is certainly due to some insider knowledge I have not disclosed about how to use my standard my superior and perfectly clean expertise at making better TVs.

This is what is happening with document standards, I know I am not the first to say this but we have a standard, the ODF, which is just fine, it does its job and it does it well. Microsoft could have embraced the open standard and spared a lot of money (we are talking of the yearly income of some African nation and perhaps also some Asian one here) to offer the users a perfectly compatible and powerful tool, instead they preferred to spend their cash for developing an alternate one, marketing it as a free and useful one, bribing the ISO board to approve it... and they have not finished yet because now that it is ready it still has to be implemented. Who do you think will pay for this? The fairy fucking godmother? Us.

Ultimately I can se no "clean" reason for them not to just open to ODF or better stick to their proprietary de facto standard... Instead they chose the expensive and cloudy way, I cannot help but thinking that they have some evil intent up their sleeve, call me negative.

There is even darker news... although with the wisdom of the grave it was not difficult to foresee: OOXML is not compatible with the General Public License. If a bell is not ringing in your head yet, this means that no free software can use it without having licensing problems. What? I thought it was an OPEN standard... like in Office OPEN XML, this means that no free software can use it and that those who decide to support OOXML will be under the constant risk of a lawsuit from Microsoft unbeatable_lawyers_from_hell shoud they decide that your project poses too much of a threat to their monopoly (but it will not because their mastery of the "standard" will always be unsurpassed due to insider knowledge).

The European Union has opened an investigation on the matter but I really doubt it will lead somewhere... for now the best I can do is to stay the hell away from Office and OOXML (which is kinda difficult as I work in a windows environment, but go tell my boss...).

Spread the word guys, because OpenOffice.org is there and it scares The Beast to the point of causing this shit, perhaps we should use it more just to prove that they are soooo right to be scared ;)