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Yankees in the Court of King Arthur, with a Microsoft Agenda

ANSI/INCiTS has completed their review of Ecma 376, and is ready to cast their ISO/IEC Contradiction Review Phase Fast Track Ballot in favor of Ecma 376 being rammed through ISO, as Sam Hiser points out in his PlexNex blog:

Rather than confront the clear evidence of contradictions and inconsistencies, the brave hearts at ANSI/INCiTS choose to narrow the definition of what a contradiction is. And narrow it they did. They decided that one standard contradicts another standard only if the proposed standard causes the existing standard not to work. […] Because both files can physically exist on the same disk without interfering with each other, our champions determined that OOXML did not contradict ODF. Maybe they thought this would go unnoticed, but as one disheartened friend of open standards pointed out:

“this argument can be used for every XML format, every programming language, every operating system, in fact every software standard, since software is ultimately data, and data can be segregated on disks. So they essentially chose a definition so narrow that it nullified the concept of ‘contradiction’ for most of what JTC1 has authority over.”

I can only hope that the European standards institutes have more sense and see ANSI's recommendation for what it is and fight this thing untill the end.

From: Open Stack.