After the April fools joke that wasn't, the hangovers have cleared and OOXML has passed. Unless it is successfully appealed, it will become standard in 2 months. Thankfully, it is being appealed. If you can, lobby your national standards authority to appeal and stop this.

All around the blogosphere, people have been slating ISO for passing this. While a lot of irregularities happened to pass it, for which the ISO should be ashamed, we need to be aware of one thing: ISO is on the good side, folks: we want standards. Most people who are involved in ISO, want good standards. Microsoft don't.

Those on ISO committees felt worldly wise about corporate lobbying: they'd seen it before. They were used to companies lobbying them to rubberstamp their technology as an international standard. But Microsoft were playing a different game. They don't want standards. They already have their monopoly. They don't even want their formats to be standarised. They want to be able to change them every release, and force another sale of Office 2010,etc. What they want to do is trash the idea of standards, and they're succeeding.

ISO was used to being the battleground, the referee. Instead it was the target, and didn't know how to cope.

This battle is like the Celts fighting the Romans. Used to cattle-raids-as-warfare, they hole up and defend themselves when the Romans come marching in, and expect the Romans to give up in a day or two when their 'cattle raid' fails. Instead the Romans dig in for the long siege, and win, while the Celts look on puzzled, and lose.

We need to retake ISO and defend it. I set up the iso-codes project within Debian several years ago to minimize the number of country and language lists out there. Now with OOXML it appears we have to also track the Microsoft list, and incompatabilities, as OOXML requires it. Ditto with DrawingML instead of SVG, and a wholew host of other standards.

Standards committee work is hard and boring. But if we don't get involved theres a lot of boring coding ahead, just tracking Microsoft. Time to join the National standards committees, somehow. Or should we lobby ISO to join as an international body?