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.

Some people have troubles accepting reality…

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.

Let’s file a request to get it under CC license at ISO/IEC/JTC-1/SC34 …

Jan

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

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.