Six questions to national standardisation bodies
Georg C. F. Greve
greve at gnu.org
Tue Jun 26 09:19:20 UTC 2007
[ http://www.fsfe.org/fellows/greve/freedom_bits/six_questions_to_national_standardisation_bodies ]
Six questions to national standardisation bodies
Tuesday 26 June 2007
It seems that many people have been confused by Microsoft's attempt
at trying to portray MS-OOXML as an Open Standard, which includes
methods such as paying bloggers to manipulate Wikipedia or trying
to confuse people about competition on the basis of a common
standard, which is generally good for competition, vs competition
of multiple standards, which is generally bad for competition.
Since this confusion exists in many national standardisation
bodies, it is not surprising to also find it on the net and in
various online sources. If they are not outright manipulated, that
is. So it comes as no surprise that journalists have a hard time to
see through the smoke, and not everyone does as good a job as the
Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ).
We therefore decided that it was time to help people working with
the national standardisation bodies and journalists inform others
about the issues in a way that would not require more than 5-10
minutes on the receiving end. The result has just gone online: Six
questions to national standardisation bodies by the Free Software
Foundation Europe (FSFE), also available in a PDF for pretty
printing. These six questions, namely
1. Application independence?
2. Supporting pre-existing Open Standards?
3. Backward compatibility for all vendors?
4. Proprietary extensions?
5. Dual standards?
6. Legally safe?
raise issues that every national standardisation body should have
satisfactory answers for, otherwise it must vote No in the ISO/IEC
process and request that Microsoft incorporate its work on MS-OOXML
into ISO/IEC 26300:2006, the Open Document Format (ODF).
In order to counter the misinformation that is currently floating
around on the net it is important to spread the word far and make
sure that these six questions are submitted to every single
national standardisation body and used as widely as possible to
inform people in politics and media.
In case you want to link the page, you can use this button
http://fsfeurope.org/graphics/msooxml_small.png
to link to the page, which exists in two versions:
* 250x98 pixel version, code:
<a href="http://fsfeurope.org/documents/msooxml-questions"
border="0"><img
src="http://fsfeurope.org/graphics/msooxml_small.png" /></a>
* 500x195 pixels version, code:
<a href="http://fsfeurope.org/documents/msooxml-questions"
border="0"><img src="http://fsfeurope.org/graphics/msooxml.png"
/></a>
Please help us spread the word.
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 306 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.fsfe.org/pipermail/discussion/attachments/20070626/a750633c/attachment.sig>
More information about the Discussion
mailing list