Re: GNOME Foundation Statement on ECMA TC45-M Participation

[Jody Goldberg <jody gnome org>]

On Sun, Nov 25, 2007 at 04:11:11AM +0100, BJörn Lindqvist wrote:
> On Nov 24, 2007 8:27 PM, Jeff Waugh <jdub perkypants org> wrote:
> > There is no "neutral game" being played here. Concerns were raised that the
> > GNOME Foundation's participation in EMCA TC45-M suggested that we supported
> > OOXML becoming an ISO standard. Thus, the answer was simple: We do not.
> 
> Well except that our representative on that committee supports OOXML
> becoming an ISO standard... Please stop the charade, getting involved
> in the process was a stupid mistake to begin with and continuing to do
> it while the hypocrisy shines through is just boneheaded.

I'll ignore the troll-ish words like 'stupid', and 'boneheaded'.
Be civil, or debate in an echo chamber.

The status of MOOX's ISOness has no bearing at all on my actions.
There are a limited set of possibilities

    1) MS and it's shills drive it through soon.
    2) MS and more shills drive it through later.
    3) MS invents a non-ISO way to declare it a standard (ala Mass).

There is no
    4) MOOX vanishes in a puff of smoke.

I do not follow the politics of the national bodies, and make no
predictions on the relative probabilities beyond the simple fact
that they total to 100%.  What seems much more interesting is that
from a technical perspective none of them have more than a marginal
impact on number of people using Office 2007.  It is already
shipping, and MS has made a commitment to it's software ecology to
conform to the published spec.

Any user that wants to use a new feature (eg sheet > 64k rows) must
move to the new format.  Whether it is an ISO standard, or not, we
will need to interact with the format, and it significantly easier
to do that if I can ask MS questions and get answers.  The ancillary
benefit of having some overlap between the logical content in MOOX
and the old binary formats is gravy.

> How on earth can offering constructive criticism, feedback and
> helping develop a specification NOT be supporting it??

By that logic all of the national bodies, and IBM are 'supporting'
the process.  They've all offered criticism (some more constructive
than others) and feedback.  The only difference is that we've had
some of our questions answered already, rather than buried in the
pile of 3000 or so the TC is digging through now.

Our developers (GNOME and OO.o), and our users are better off with a
clearer spec.