“Mission Accomplished!”… or so they said

 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?