December 2007

What's in a name? And no, its not an acronym... Anyway, the article is a blog post about one Ken Holman who is stepping down from the ISO subcommittee responsible for SGML. The first part of the post is about the ISO name bit but the second part has to do with how some of the ISO committees operate and some possible changes in the wind especially in regards to our good friends at SC34 (you know, the document format handlers).

Apparently there is talk of setting up another working group to deal specifically with office document formats... it seems "the volume of work required of ODF and OOXML is threatening to overwhelm the members of those [existing] groups".

The MoJ have been working on an OSS strategy for some time. Barry Polley at the MOJ has released it today and given us permission to distribute its contents widely.

It is groundbreaking and I guarantee you will be pleased. Here are some pertinent quotes:

"The Ministry needs an explicit strategy to embrace the adoption and use of OSS."
"Knee-jerk prohibition of OSS is no longer feasible or cost-effective"
"government agencies have a much easier case justifying the use of OSS."

The New Zealand Open Source Society is participating in the next round of Standard New Zealand's review of the Microsoft/ECMA responses to ISO's NB comments for OOXML. You may recall Standards NZ voted "No - with comments" with regards to the proposed standard earlier in the year.

Standards NZ will be participating in ISO Ballot Resolution Meeting to be held in February next year.