Yelling? How about reasoned arguments. ISO standards are merely accreditations, like getting your facilities ISO9000 certified. The criteria for getting an ISO accreditation is no more than documenting your specification and surrendering change control. Word was a de-facto industry standard, there was absolutely no justification for not accepting it as an ISO standard. The game the ODF side was attempting to play was to get various governments to insert support for open standards into procurement contracts and then ensure that only the ODF format was allowed to become a specification. That is not a strategy I consider to be ethical. If they had been lobbying corporations rather than government entities it would be a very clear anti-trust violation. Playing that type of game in ISO does not have anti-trust issues as they have recognition as an international treaty organization. But playing the same game in IETF would lead to serious lawsuits. What sound like quaint customs inside the IETF would likely sound rather different in court under cross examination by plaintiff's counsel. Do you want to explain to m'lud how the issue was decided on a hum? On Thu, Jun 11, 2009 at 9:22 AM, Harald Alvestrand<harald@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote: >> >> On Thu, Jun 11, 2009 at 6:58 AM, Harald Alvestrand<harald@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> >> wrote: >> >>> >>> Voting has all kinds of issues. >>> >> >> Precisely the type of vague, non reason that I was complaining about. >> > > Consider the last ten years of yelling to be included by reference. >> >> >>> >>> I like the current Nomcom process because it depends on 2 things: >>> >>> - A pool of qualified volunteers >>> - Luck in picking a nomcom that behaves sensibly (for whatever that means >>> to >>> you) >>> >>> Given that luck is involved, many of the possible attacks that people >>> could >>> mount in order to gain more IETF influence won't happen - simply because >>> they have a significant chance of failure. Trying, failing, and being >>> detected as having tried, would be harmful to the group that tried it. >>> >> >> The last time I was aware of anything like that happening in any >> standards group was when XrML was killed in OASIS, but the issue there >> was people opposed to DRM, not a company driven thing. >> >> Where companies want to tilt the playing field they usually have to >> start the organization to succeed. Or get in early like the XRI folk >> did with OpenID. And fat lot of good it did them. >> >> >> As a former corporate rep, I can assure you that there is precisely >> zero value in gaining the imprimatur of the IETF (or OASIS or W3C for >> that matter) if you short circuit the process. The point of standards >> participation is to get buy in from other parties you need to build >> common infrastructure. >> > > Sure. That's why Microsoft spent so much resource (and credibility) making > sure the OOXML vote went through; they did not gain anything of value. > Or perhaps the value proposition is different for ISO than for the IETF. > > > -- -- New Website: http://hallambaker.com/ View Quantum of Stupid podcasts, Tuesday and Thursday each week, http://quantumofstupid.com/ _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf