Petition against OOXML

[Tech Writer]

This web page also contains the note:

IT IS URGENT THAT YOU CONTACT YOUR STANDARDISATION BODY IN YOUR COUNTRY AND 
EXPLAIN THEM WHY OOXML IS BROKEN; SENDING A NICE LETTER TO YOUR 
STANDARDISATION BODY IN YOUR COUNTRY IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN SIGNING THE 
PETITION

Is this really useful?  If so, does anyone have a name and address that a 
letter could be sent to?

Peg

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Ted Roche" <tedroche at tedroche.com>
To: "Greater NH Linux User Group" <gnhlug-discuss at mail.gnhlug.org>
Sent: Saturday, July 07, 2007 9:43 AM
Subject: Petition against OOXML


> Bill McGonigle blogged [1]:
>
> "You can sign a petition here [2] asking the national representatives to
> ISO to not approve Microsoft's OpenOfficeXML (nothing to do with
> OpenOffice, of course - just named to seed confusion) application for
> standards-approval by ISO. The most absurd part of the standard is that
> parts of it are secret, so it’s not even a standard at all. The Open
> Office Open Document Format is a much better standard, which is free to
> read and free to implement, and covers the needs of office applications.
> This is why everybody, including Microsoft, is embracing or at least
> implementing ODF readers and writers. ODF is already an ISO Standard and
> it meets the basic criteria for a standard."
>
> [1]
> http://blog.bfccomputing.com/articles/2007/06/25/sign-petition-against-ooxml
>
> [2] http://www.noooxml.org/petition
>
> The Microsoft document is no standard. It has blocks of property
> descriptions that don't explain what they are nor how they are used.
> There are no implementations of what's documented, likely not even from
> Microsoft. There's no way to independently implement what's described in
> the document without running afoul of licensing and patent-infringement
> issues.
>
> ISO should do better.
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>