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Story: Google: OOXML 'insufficient and unnecessary'

Posted by: Marbux (Friday 29 February 2008, 7:25 PM)

Durusau's proposal is preposterous

Albert said:

I think this is correctly identified also by Partick Durusau of the ODF TC (one of the few non Sun/IBM voting members) who has made a case in these recent weeks for having these two standards together. Both ODF and OOXML.

You missed the footnote in Durusau's article where he mentioned that his participation on the ODF TC is funded by Sun.

Durusau's position is indefensible. The Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade is all about eliminating unnecessary obstacles to international trade by eliminating incompatible standards with duplicate functionality. See e.g., Agreement Article 2 section 2.6:

With a view to harmonizing technical regulations on as wide a basis as possible, Members shall play a full part, within the limits of their resources, in the preparation by appropriate international standardizing bodies of international standards for products for which they either have adopted, or expect to adopt, technical regulations.

All of the arguments for having competing incompatible international standards depend on the fact that the treaty has been previously violated. But previous violations of the law is no defense to its enforcement. E.g., not every murder is prosecuted; should that mean we should not prosecute the next?

The notion that competing, incompatible IT standards are a Good Thing is one of the more comedic chestnuts that has emerged from the File Format War.

If you are advocating that, you are either ignorant of the technological barriers thus created as well as the governing law or you are deliberately making a fallacious appeal to ignorance. Your choice. There is no middle ground. It's an indefensible position.

--Buck Martin
Universal Interoperability Council

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