Open Office XML has been approved as an international recognized standard by the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO), despite the open source community voices that have raised a number of problems with the standard as such and with unfair practices during the process with such as committee stuffing in several countries and political interventions of ministers in the standardization process.
ISO/IEC DIS 29500 - Information technology - Office Open XML file formats is a XML-based file format specification for electronic documents, developed by Microsoft and adopted as ECMA 376 standard in December 2006. After that, it was promoted by Microsoft and ECMA in the ISO fast-track procedure, but has initially failed in September last year, when only 53% of the votes from the national bodies part of the ISO/IEC JTC 1 were positive and 26% of the national votes were negative.
However, after the meetings in Geneva in February this year where the 3500 received comments were debated in the ballot resolution meeting, Microsoft has succeeded in convincing the majority they needed, with some of the major European countries such as UK, Ireland, France or Denmark changing their initial vote. The joint technical committee ISO/IEC JTC 1, Information technology, had 75 % of the JTC 1 participating member votes cast positive and 14 % of the total of national member body votes cast negative, therefore the standard has been adopted. Not even one of the standardization bodies from a European country voted against the standard.
As suspected, Microsoft was happy with the adoption of its 6 000 page set of specifications as an international standard: "With 86 percent of voting national bodies supporting ratification, there is overwhelming support for Open XML. This outcome is a clear win for the customers, technology providers and governments that want to choose the format that best meets their needs and have a voice in the evolution of this widely adopted standard" stated Tom Robertson, General Manager of Interoperability and Standards at Microsoft.
But the supporters of the ODF victory claimed that the victory is a loss of credibility of the standardisation: "The result could well prove a hollow victory for Microsoft. It comes at a considerable cost to the reputations of Microsoft, ECMA and the International Standards Organisation (ISO)", explained Graham Taylor, the chief executive of OpenForum Europe.
The opponents of the OOXML highlighted the technical problems of the new standard and the rush of adopting such a large technical document without a proper documentation. But the main focus of the challenge was made to the politics behind the scene. The NO-OOXML campaigners explained:
"The technical review of the format was strongly obstructed by its originator and its political interference in the ISO process.
Presence of Microsoft Business Partners has been reported in the following
countries: Belgium, Brazil, Colombia, Denmark, Egypt, Italy, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Mexico, Nigeria, Portugal, Slovenia, Sweden, Switzerland and the United States of America. Furthermore, it has been reported in several countries, such as France and Malaysia, that Microsoft has lobbied the government and the responsible ministers to override the decisions of the technical committees, which spoke out against an approval of the format."
The problems are also investigated by the European Commission, as confirmed by a spokesman for the Commissioner for Competition, Neelie Kroes. He said that the Commission continues to scrutinise "interoperability issues related to Microsoft's products following complaints from the Committee for Interoperable Systems (ECIS) group." In this action, the Commission has asked several national standards bodies, including the Norwegian Standards Institute (NSI), on alleged irregularities in the OOXML standardisation process.
http://www.edri.org/edrigram/number6.7/ooxml-adopted-iso
