On Tue, 04 Sep 2007 19:55:02 -0400 James Knott <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Not only that, but they've been blatantly cheating, to get it approved, > using, among other things, stuffing the the national commitees with > business partners, taking control of meetings and violating procedure This is very true. It is not unusual for a market leader to try to control standards. IBM did it with both the ANSI and CODASYL committees years ago. In the US, the standards committees were vendor dominated, and it was somewhat a case where each vendor certainly wanted some of their pet features. Some vendors were on the committees just to gain some intelligence, and others wanted their representatives to protect their interests. In the case of relational database where I served on the committee, the IBM representative was the editor. We started to go down a somewhat obscure path until a few members decided that a lot of work we had done was really too offbeat, and we reset the standard back to essentially the IBM Sequel model. Had we continued on our path, we would have had a standard that no one would implement. By resetting back to Sequel, we not only had an implementable standard, but we also had one that was also the current defacto standard. Microsoft, as the industry leader wants to be able to fully control the document landscape. By not adopting ODF in their products and by pushing a standard that they fully control gives them continued control of the market. We are at a crossroad today. Governments and businesses all over the world want to standardize their documents. Will Microsoft propose a reasonable change to ODF that meets their technical needs or will they push for changes that subvert ODF. I suspect that it will be very difficult for them to do that in the future as a result of the recent issues in Europe. -- Jerry Feldman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Boston Linux and Unix user group http://www.blu.org PGP key id:C5061EA9 PGP Key fingerprint:053C 73EC 3AC1 5C44 3E14 9245 FB00 3ED5 C506 1EA9
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