The news have fallen out of the teleprompters. I couldn’t keep that for much longer. I’m giggling on my chair and nibbling sheets of paper. Outside, people are gathering on the sidewalks. You could almost guess the humming of the press and the accelerating trucks of local news networks everywhere in the country. I’ve seen some people throwing up from joy.
That’s it. There it is . Our moment has come….
OOXML final final version has landed and is now available for download!
Rejoice, oh humanity!
Hail your new master, Steve Ballmer!
(praying voices of Ewok tribes in the background)
Tadadii Tadaduum Tadaa!
Nevermind if many had seen it before, I had even announced it on this blog. Now it’s officially availble, for real. I swear. Just visit the ISO web site. And it’s FREE! Free as in beer! Isn’t that a great way to start the Holiday Season?
Ah, OOXML. We spent almost two years with you. And something tells me we’re not about to end such an interesting relationship. What a story, what an adventure it has been! With some hindsight, I am not disappointed to see OOXML reach the ISO status. My work at the Afnor my contributions to NOOOXML and OpenForum Europe have taught me a lot about people, institutions. I’ve gained some real friends, men and women that are bound by a common experience of a common fight, and one that is all the more beautiful because it was an essentially fair and noble one. I have also seen corruption, greed, little and not so little treasons, servility (especially in those so-called reasonable people) fear, fear in my opponents and fear in myself and my friends. I have seen all this. Now that OOXML is an ISO standard, it is perhaps time to realize that it’s not just a “dirty standard”, but a standard that has shown the complete irrelevance of ISO in the matters of IT. ISO management will continue to clinge to their obsolescent ideology like old soviet leaders who thought communism was at hand’s reach in 1989 or like U.S. President G.W. Bush who still thinks in 2008 that free market has fundamentally no issue at all. But I digress.
To all those I have worked with on OOXML, I would like to express my deepest and most sincere wishes in this beginning Holiday Season. To all those against whom I have fought, I send my respects. “Mission Accomplished”, folks: Don’t sing it too loud, nobody would believe you.
Correction/Clarification: OOXML is not readily available on the ISO web site. You have to agree to a license that essentially does make it a closed standard subject to obligations to access the documents. Why am I not surprised?
Why are you so negative, Charles?
Let’s start with the most simple aspect, it is not freely available:
“The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal and may be punishable by criminal law.”
and an ISO phrase that serves our idiosyncratic ooxml humour:
“While all reasonable care is taken in the preparation and review of ISO International Standards and other deliverables, ISO does not warrant that the content of the document is accurate or up to date or that the document will be suitable for your purposes.”
Open XML is great fun! More to come.
OOXML specification is not publicly available, at least Google won’t even find it.
Well, ISO doesn’t matter and as I concluded in recent months, nor do many of the other organizations people lose sleep over…
OOXML coming out doesn’t mean ODF is any less available or any worse, and it’s had a time advantage. If people now want to choose OOXML with all its flaws they can do that on their own peril. So what’s the big deal? Can’t ODF stand on its own without being the only one with the nice little, yet obviously meaningless ISO badge?
Bush doesn’t know what he’s talking about or just uses doublespeak or doublethink or both. Ultimately it doesn’t matter what that crook says, or any of them for that matter. At the same time as he’s supposedly defending the values of the free market he is breaking them without hesitation. Bail outs are only the most obvious example.
What is failing is corporatism and socialism, not the free market. If you think what US (and Europe) had in recent decades was a free market you weren’t paying attention.
Cheers
OOXML is NOT publicly available. It is individually available from a public webpage after going through a shrink-wrap license – just as M$ Windows
Let’s file a request to get it under CC license at ISO/IEC/JTC-1/SC34 …
Jan
I would be extremely embarassed as a Microsoft employee to see such bad engineering go out in public.
And it is amazing that Microsoft chose to go their way by taking the easiest shortcut, i.e. create an XML version of their crappy formats, only to make it possible for them to migrate back and forth between old and new formats. Not only it is bad, but it has been used in the marketing anytime they mention “backwards compatibility”. What they don’t mention of course is that given how bad the situation is, they are the only one able to do that 100% accurately, meaning their customers have no choice.
It’s too bad that Microsoft did not take the time to at least remove the redundant pieces (many ways to do text formatting in the spreadsheet format alone), make it interoperable piece by piece with other document formats, and to build on existing ISO pieces instead of reinventing everything. Before making their work available, and before buying their way to ISO. That would have been evidence of a real commitment to interoperability.
Again, we can move on, but it’s a sad state of affairs for software engineering from one of the leading corporations.
The hope now is that this bloated crap falls under itself, when people both inside and outside the company realize that this thing is not designed for the future.
Completly free
ISO/IEC 29500:2008
http://standards.iso.org/ittf/PubliclyAvailableStandards/index.html
Some people have troubles accepting reality…
“Correction/Clarification: OOXML is not readily available on the ISO web site. You have to agree to a license that essentially does make it a closed standard subject to obligations to access the documents. Why am I not surprised?”
May I point out that *any* standard that you download from the Publicly Available Standards page requires you to agree to that very same license? In fact, at the bottom of the page there’s an “ISO Copyright for the freely available standards” link, which will make the copyright appear at the top of the page:
“The following standards are made freely available for standardization purposes. They are protected by copyright and therefore and unless otherwise specified, no part of these publications may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, microfilm, scanning, reproduction in whole or in part to another Internet site, without permission in writing from ISO. Requests should be addressed to the ISO Central Secretariat.
The documents you are about to download are a single-user, non-revisable Adobe Acrobat PDF file, to store on your personal computer. You may print out and retain one printed copy of the PDF file. This printed copy is fully protected by national and international copyright laws, and may not be photocopied or reproduced in any form. Under no circumstances may it be resold.”
I find it strange that a supposedly open, international standards organisation uses such restrictive terms, but this is apparently not specific to the MSOffice OpenXML standard.