ISO: No to OOXML
Against all expectations and in the face of some pretty serious voting irregularities (hundreds of Microsoft partner companies joining up at the last minute in order to pack the vote), the International Organisation for Standardization voted 'No' to Microsoft's bogus Office document standard.
I'm impressed. It was very much like watching the UN refusing to endorse the US invasion of Iraq. A huge effort by a major player using all-out dirty tricks to bribe and coerce an international body into doing something blatantly wrong, almost getting there, and yet failing. As then, so now my respect for international democratic institutions just went up a notch. I thought the ISO was completely sold out to power and greed; turns out it's only mostly sold out. And there'll hopefully be a huge backlash against Microsoft for this. The first rule of bribing the judge is, make sure you don't accidentally try it on an honest one, and if you must, for goodness sakes don't do it right out in public, in front of the whole world. Threats, bullying, and the ability to turn off a huge portion of the world's communication grid at a switch only get you so far. At some point, to continue to rule, a superpower actually needs to have some measure of respect from its subject races and at least a pretence of lip-service to being an honest broker.
But this should never have happened in the first place. Too much of the world's information infrastructure is currently held hostage to proprietary monopoly cartels, and we now depend far too much on that infrastructure continuing to run. The world needs open, honest data standards and it needed them yesterday.
More than that, though, we need open, honest governance at the global level, and as far as I can see so far, an open Internet - while not being that itself - is our last, best hope for a place where we can start to build such a thing. Projects like Wikileaks, for instance, give me hope.
I can dream, anyway.
