IT Pros Stage Protest In Norway
April 11, 2008 | by Christopher Nickson
About 60 IT professionals stage a street protest in Norway against the ISO adoption of Microsoft's OOXML.
It’s not often you’ll find IT professionals worked up enough to stage a protest out on the streets, especially in peaceful Norway. But, according to AP, that’s exactly what happened in Oslo. Around 60 experts in data use took to the street to demonstrate against the adoption of Microsoft’s Office Open XML standard by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).
It was all put together by Steve Pepper, who resigned as chair of the Standards Norway committee after being outvoted on the issue. Many feel that the adoption of OOXML will stifle competition. He claimed that Microsoft put pressure on the committee so that it ended up ignoring the advice of software experts in the country.
"People shouldn't have to pay money to Microsoft to be able to read my documents," Pepper said.
Opponents of OOXML claim that OpenDocument Format (ODF) was a good ISO standard.
The protest, perhaps unsurprisingly, was peaceful.
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Ian Kemmish on Apr 11th, 2008 at 9:01 AM:
Well, I have no idea whether his documents are any more worth reading than mine, but I expect there are people who wouldn't want to pay him an hourly support fee just because he's the only person who knows how to fix the broken reader that's needed in order to peruse them:-)