[LINK] Uniform Office Format from China

[Tom Worthington]

At 11:09 AM 9/07/2007, jim birch wrote:
>... 
>http://www.consortiuminfo.org/standardsblog/article.php?story=2006110806164573
>
>... the Chinese are out to produce their own standards that that 
>will allow them to develop their own products
>in green (unencumbered) fields. ...

Sounds reasonable to me. If a "standard" requires you to use someone 
else's patented technology which you are required to pay them for, or 
has not been designed for your requirements, then it is sensible to 
seek a free and open alternative. The impression I have got from 
talking to Chinese technologists is that they are happy to use 
standards, provided these do what they need and do not disadvantage them.

Many of the supposed universal standards have western biases built 
in, others require the payment of royalties for use. Two examples:

* MPEG: The organisation MPEG LA collects fees for the use of the 
MPEG 2 and MPEG 4 standards <http://www.mpegla.com/aboutus.cfm>. The 
fee for use of MPEG-4 is up to one million US dollars per year 
<http://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/07/16/mpeg_4_is_go_licence/>.

* UNICODE is supposed to be a pure unbiased universal way to encode 
characters. But the first 128 Unicode characters are the ASCII 
character set (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) 
and the fist 256 characters are the same as ISO 8859-1 (Latin 1) 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode#Origin_and_development>. This 
is very handy for the USA, UK, Australia and much of Europe, but not 
a lot of use for China, Japan or Korea. A similar approach is being 
taken with web domain names: everybody is catered for, but if you 
speak English, it is a lot easier 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalized_domain_name>.



Tom Worthington FACS HLM tom.worthington at tomw.net.au Ph: 0419 496150
Director, Tomw Communications Pty Ltd            ABN: 17 088 714 309
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