On Tuesday 24 April 2007 10:22, MJ Ray wrote:
There's just been a call for help on a debian mailing list. In amongst it, it includes the phrase "I did not get a response from the Free Software Foundation Europe." What's happened?
Torsten is in close contact with some FSFE people, so it is unlikely that he did not get an answer at all.
From bounce-debian-project=mjr=phonecoop.coop@lists.debian.org Tue Apr 24 06:41:23 2007 Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2007 07:41:08 +0200 From: "Torsten Werner" twerner@debian.org Reply-To: mail.twerner@googlemail.com To: debian-project@lists.debian.org Subject: ballot period for ECMA 376 / DIS 29500 (aka OOXML) List-Id: <debian-project.lists.debian.org>
I want to remind you that the ballot period about Microsoft/ECMA office document format runs until the beginning of September and national ISO bodies have to vote about the fasttrack process.
BTW: Note that using "fasttrack" is a bit confusing, the ballot period is not faster than others, as far as I know.
Microsoft is very active in this process, free software people are not as far as I know, e.g. I did not get a response from the Free Software Foundation Europe.
FSFE is active on OOXML. (e.g. see Georg's blog entry: http://fsfe.org/en/fellows/greve/freedom_bits/update_on_openxml_vs_odf )
But we lack the resources to take all possible actions. Getting people into all commissions and doing the work there is very resources intensive in terms of money and time. Sometimes there are even entrance fees.
The risk of a successful standardization of OOXML is the marginalization of ODF (ISO 26300) which would make migrations from non-free software to free software more difficult in the long run.
True.
Personally I doubt that preventing an ISO standardisation is worth very high costs, because a) just because something is standardised does not make it a good format b) the standardisation process has some problems which are even harder to fix, so it is doubtfull that standardisation of further office formats can be prevented ultimately at all.
Most "no" votes will have a condition to be turned to yes if it is resolved. My expecation is that the good work of the following document will result in a lot of strong conditions: http://www.grokdoc.net/index.php/EOOXML_objections
c) This is not the only thing that prevents Free Software adoption d) We need to prepare for adoption of improved formats coming out of Free Software processes as well, having arguments in place that only ISO standardised documents are good might be counter productive later.
Again this is my personal opinion, others FSFE people have different views.
If you are interested in preventing that scenario please take action *now*. Contact your national ISO bodies and tell them your interests. In Germany you can become a member of DIN's working group. I can explain the details if someone is interested. Maybe that is possible in other countries, too.
A good starting point for more information is http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20070123071154671 .
It is good that Torsten tries to motivate more people to help.
Bernhard