From greve@gnu.org Tue Jun 26 11:30:56 2007
From: "Georg C. F. Greve" <greve@gnu.org>
To: discussion@lists.fsfe.org
Subject: Six questions to national standardisation bodies
Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2007 11:19:20 +0200
Message-ID: <m34pkv2huv.fsf@cerebro.fsfeurope.org>
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[ http://www.fsfe.org/fellows/greve/freedom_bits/six_questions_to_national_st=
andardisation_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 Z=C3=BCrcher 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=3D"http://fsfeurope.org/documents/msooxml-questions"
       border=3D"0"><img
       src=3D"http://fsfeurope.org/graphics/msooxml_small.png" /></a>

     * 500x195 pixels version, code:

       <a href=3D"http://fsfeurope.org/documents/msooxml-questions"
       border=3D"0"><img src=3D"http://fsfeurope.org/graphics/msooxml.png"
       /></a>

   Please help us spread the word.

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