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In a complete volte face from its position last autumn and a slap in the face for the British IT industry as a whole, the BSI's technical group is set to advise the decision making committee to lend British Standard Institution (BSI) support
to Microsoft Corporation's application to have its Office Open XML (OOXML) adopted as an International Standard, according to this article in Chanel Register. The critical meeting is tomorrow, Saturday 29th March. There are standards in place which are genuinely platform independent and which Microsoft Corporation, after paying lip service to, has consistently failed to comply with. Indeed, the EU Competition Commissioners have levied heavy fines upon the corporation for non-compliance and anti-competitive practices over the past few years. The latest was earlier this year, when it was fined £681,000,000. That is a staggering sum and it would be an equally staggering act of faith to trust a group with such a history to set and apply standards to which others are expected to comply. The committee which will make the decision is called ICT/-/1and it can be contacted on +44 (0)20 8996 9001 or you can email them at
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, which we sincerely hope you will do, even at this late hour. They are not obliged to comply with the technical group recommendation and they are supposed to work on concensus. CommentThe technical group is officially called IST/41and it is chaired by Francis Cave. As recently as last Autumn, this group was, sensibly in our view, against the proposal. It is now reported to be 5 to 1 in favour. That is a breathtaking turnaround. Have the members of the group had pressure applied? Has Cave been subjected to pressure? From whence and by whom? The whole IT industry expects and deserves a thorough explanation.
Brazil and India, among others, have already voted against. They can see the harm this would wreak upon their nascent and importantly, independent IT industries. We have some enviable IT talent in this country, too. Sadly, we see it having to compete with Business Links open support for a foreign monolith. FE colleges and HE institutions train for the same monolith, for employers to find they have to retrain so their new recruits genuinely understand how computing works. Here we have yet another British institution, if the reports are accurate, ready to ring another death knell in an area government after government pays lip service to wanting to nurture and develop, only to swallow the MS hype hook, line and sinker.. If we can get our own standards authority to say no, the proposal falls. Given Microsoft Corporation's track record with respect to anti-competitive behaviour, that has to be a good thing even if the single platform issue were not present. |
