O'Reilly News & Commentary

Fake real-time blog from JTC1 Meeting, Nara, Japan

By Rick Jelliffe
November 21, 2008

ISO/IEC JTC1 (the international standards body that looks after Information Technology standards) has just published two documents from its recent meetings in Nara, Japan. Along with the publication of IS29500 today, these represent a kind of line being drawn underneath the OOXML episode. JTC1 also addresses the "one standard" issue but needs to go further on reform of accelerated processes like the contentious "fast-track" submission.

OOXML standards finally published and available free!

By Rick Jelliffe
November 21, 2008

I am delighted to see that the free site for ISO publicly available standards finally has the OOXML standards available:

The Cathedral and the Bazaar and Standards

By Rick Jelliffe
September 23, 2008

The job of standards to promote bazaars. The large monolithic standard is anti-market, however scaffold technologies and small modules are pro-market, which is not to say they necessarily have any commercial appeal. How do we apply these ideas (parallelism, human scale, scaffolding, modularity, evolvability) to standards, and particular to standards development and adoption? Web Meets World

Plan A, Plan B, Plan C, Plan D, the CONSEGI Declaration, and the Brazilian suppression

By Rick Jelliffe
September 11, 2008

I think that underneath the IT bigwigs' comments is the ghost of Plan A: an avoidance of responsibility by procurement or policy makers by invoking the authority of ISO as the reason why a standard should be adopted as a strategy to disentangle from Microsoft and go open source. However, since that was a dodgy proposition to start with (i.e. the invocation, not the disentangling), withdrawing it actually withdraws nothing.

Is Office Suite Markup worth the trouble?

By Simon St. Laurent
August 14, 2008

In his Extreme "first person" talk yesterday, Patrick Durusau asked some of the right questions about the recent explosive battles over standardizing XML generated by Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.org. I can't share his conviction, though, that getting through this firefight...

What are they so scared of?

By Rick Jelliffe
July 17, 2008

Why are these people so scared of openness? This may seem a strange and provocative thing to say. Surely ODF is the open technology and OOXML is the proprietary technology? Surely we know this because "ISO" is the organization which is just the puppet of MicroSoft while OASIS is a bastion of community openness!

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