Key Vote on Microsoft's Open XML Approaches

[Sunite]

Key Vote on Microsoft's Open XML Approaches
By Mark Long
August 30, 2007 10:40AM

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The ISO's approval of Open XML is clearly important to Microsoft, and is also important to members of the open-source community, which has been promoting the OpenDocument Format. Any decision to accept both Open XML and the OpenDocument Format would be "hard to fathom," said You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login community manager Louis Suarez-Potts.

Related Topics
   Microsoft
   Open XML
   Open Source
   OpenDocument Format
   ISO
   Standards

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   The representative bodies from 20 member nations at the International Standards Organization (ISO Relevant Products/Services) will cast their votes this weekend to decide whether Microsoft Relevant Products/Services's Open XML format will become a new international standard for creating, editing, and storing documents.

Brazil, India, and New Zealand have said they will be withholding their endorsements. The standards council of New Zealand concluded it would vote "no" after receiving comments concerning "technical omissions, errors, and inconsistencies" in the draft proposals, said its chief operating officer Grant Thomas earlier Thursday.

But despite the certainty of a few "no" votes, the final outcome of this Sunday's vote tally at the ISO is far from clear.

Stacking the Deck

The ISO's approval of Open XML is clearly important to Microsoft. In a recent blog posting, Microsoft senior director for intellectual property and interoperability Jason Matusow admitted that one of the company's more zealous employees in Sweden had tried to stack the deck in the software giant's favor.

According to Matusow, the employee had e-mailed two Microsoft partners "a request to participate in the Swedish process, telling them that they would be responsible for paying the membership fee if they did, but also making a related reference to marketing activities and extra support." However, the two partners subsequently were instructed to disregard the earlier e-mail.

The result of this Sunday's vote is also important to members of the open-source community, which has been promoting the rival OpenDocument Format already approved by ISO.

"The modern world has become utterly dependent upon technology, and therefore upon the ability of standards organizations to provide interoperability and other open standards," said Linux Foundation spokesperson Amanda McPherson. "Creation of documents in proprietary formats at best jeopardizes the ability, and at worst guarantees that easy access in the future will be impossible."

Simply Indigestible

Open XML has 6,000 pages of specification compared to only 860 pages for the OpenDocument Format. Because of the spec length, the Linux Foundation maintains that the review period that the ISO has allowed for Open XML "is insufficient to provide confidence that all issues that may need to be resolved before Open XML could meet minimum quality standards," McPherson said.

Moreover, McPherson argued, Microsoft has used its own, proprietary internal specifications rather than publicly available alternatives, which raises questions concerning whether implementers in the future will be able to fully implement Open XML without infringing on Microsoft's intellectual property.

The OpenDocument Format and the OpenOffice productivity suite which runs it "represent real threats to vendors with proprietary aspirations," said You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login community manager Louis Suarez-Potts. "Microsoft's OXML is effectively proprietary," he noted.

"Look around the world and the OpenOffice productivity suite is everywhere, with upwards of 85 million downloads and over 100 languages," he added. "In every region of the globe, our product -- and the ODF in general -- is being considered by governments for use."

Any decision to accept both Open XML and the OpenDocument Format would be "hard to fathom" without being concerned that certain vendor lobbying efforts would end up producing a result that is "far from the goal of implementing vendor-neutral document formats," Suarez-Potts concluded.