When “Agreed” means No.

Speaking of agreement, I should point out how misleading Microsoft/Ecma’s Disposition of Comments is.

The Pro-OOXML lobbyists a la Rick Jeliffe were prompt to demonstrate with fancy graphics how “The Editor (Rex Jaeschke on behalf of ECMA TC45) has accepted the lion’s share.” Graphics that are now being reused by Microsoft in other documents prepared to convinced NBs that everything is fine, Microsoft/Ecma accepted most comments.

Of course, Microsoft conveniently forgets to mention that even Rick Jeliffe himself admitted in a follow up comment that “ISO-ese ‘Agreed’ is sometimes more like the Japanese ‘Hai’ or English ‘OK’ rather than the English ‘Yes’.” and that “indeed [this graphic] is of limited usefulness“.

Ironically enough, Rick ends up explaining that it’s because ‘People want slogans and headlines and they prefer “MS agrees to nothing” or “MS agrees to everything” to “Editor agrees to most but not all issues raised and makes suggestions in response usually prompted by the suggested solutions of the national bodies.”‘, that he made this post, all the while producing one of the most bogus and misleading piece of information for Microsoft to reuse as a headline and slogan.

I have personally read my share of comments and responses from Ecma and I had myself made this puzzling observation that while many responses start with “Agreed.” they follow with an explanation for denial of the request. Rick claims that in this case “Agreed” means “OK” but my reading of this is that it often merely means “No”.

While Microsoft/Ecma’s response is impressive in size, its content is far less impressive, and this kind of tactic can only lead to conclude that it is designed to mislead people into thinking they have agreed to most comments.

I wonder how that plays with the notion of “standards professionalism”…

Can you live with it?

In this latest entry Jason Matusow started the final phase of Microsoft’s pro-OOXML lobbying by saying how much “I really like [ Patick Durusau's ] comment in his first footnote on the first page:

Granted, I have a number of issues with the current OpenXML proposal but experts do disagree in good faith even within open standards development projects. If a proposal cannot progress until we all agree, then we risk proposals being held hostage to whim and caprice.“

Jason then insists on “The fact that there may be issues that remain open and/or in contention does not necessitate the perpetuation of a “no” following the BRM.” and that “[he is] hopeful that the same spirit of standards professionalism exhibited in Patrick’s letter will be reflected across all NSBs.“

The sole irony of being lectured on “standards professionalism” by a Microsoft employee could have prompted me to write about this just because, having spent the greater part of my career working on standards, I find the whole OOXML debacle truly appalling and a total disgrace to the standards community. But this is not why I’m writing about it.

The reason I’m posting this entry is because, while I agree that total agreement isn’t always achievable, it is a mistake to conclude that it is therefore unreasonable, or unprofessional, for a NB to insist on disagreeing by maintaining a No vote, and that instead they should accept that not all of their requests can be fulfilled so they should let go.

Anybody who’s participated in the development of standards knows that it’s all about compromises. It is a give and take process. Nobody gets exactly what he wants, but nobody gets nothing. In some cases, all agree, in other cases, they don’t. The question then is the level of disagreement you have and how you deal with it.

I think it serves to look at the W3C in this regard, because W3C is an organization that thrives to be open and to not favor any particular stakeholder. For this reason it has set as a goal for itself to make decisions by consensus as much as possible.

Consensus does not mean everybody agrees, but it sets the bar higher than having a majority. A practical way to judge whether consensus is reached is not only to ask whether everybody agrees but also whether anybody strongly disagrees. The actual question asked to judge the latter is: “Can you live with it?”

What’s interesting is that the result can be completely different. In a situation where there are two options A and B, where the majority favors A over B but somebody can’t live with A, while everybody can live with B, B is the chosen option.

Getting back to OOXML, the question is not simply whether there are remaining open issues and whether NBs agree or not. The question is the number of issues that remain open, the importance of these issues, and ultimately whether they can live with it or not.

Given that NBs were never given the time necessary to review the whole specification, that the little review that could be done has revealed a low quality level, plus the fact that the BRM is limited to discussing the issues that were raised from partial reviews, no matter what happens at the BRM, there is plenty left for one to say “I can’t live with it”. It would actually be unprofessional not to.