Michael Adams wrote:
<snip />
The spec is maintained by Ecma and the committee there maintaining it
are principally Microsoft. The ISO process has actually had minimal
impact on the spec. Microsoft will be highly pleased by this.
I believe the maintenance is actually now under the control of the JTC-1
committee. The review process added over 2000 pages of new text to the
spec, moved huge swathes of it from normative to deprecated and many
hundreds of typographical and editorial changes. I'm not sure this is
what I'd call minimal, but I do agree that Microsoft managed - somehow -
to absolutely STOP any changes that would be to the detriment of the
current implementation that is in Office 2007.
Brian Jones has said before that they cannot commit to blindly
supporting ISO's spec. It might go in directions they do not wish to
follow - or words to that effect.
I've seen reference to this quote before, but never actually seen the
quote. It was meant to refer to a reply he made in the comments section
of one of his blog posts. But the comment was pulled and i know of no
proper archive of it.
It is out there - I read it again the other day. Various news articles
and sites carry copies of it I think. If I get time I'll dig for it but
it doesn't really matter. They don't care and neither do I to be frank.
This is a very long road and one which I honestly believe Microsoft
will ultimately regret having taken...
No, it is something they do to counter the principally European
resistance to their vendor-lockin. Ecma is a European organisation, and
was i suspect chosen both for it's fasttrack process as it's
European-ness. It was a well calculated move.
They chose ECMA because ECMA are their puppets and Microsoft are their
paymaster. There is no other organisation eligible to issue fast track's
other than the EU Commision and the IEC I believe. There are just three
bodies. I strongly suspect that ECMA will not be on this list by the
time we see 2009.
Anyway - it's a crap spec, everyone knows it, ISO is now tainted, ECMA
are history and our job is to promote ODF and FOSS in a more concerted
way than ever before.
Al
--
The way out is open!
http://www.theopensourcerer.com
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