Slashdot Mirror

To whoever missed the "format wars" they are nicely (And fervently) documented on Jomar Silva's (A.K.A. Homembit) blog -
ending at 2008-09 entries: http://homembit.com/2008/09/popular-participation-on-international-standardization-process-opening-the-black-box.html

Jomar, a core contributor to ODF, was one of Brazil's envoy to the ISO group in which Microsoft format were aproved, trying to prevent it from happening as it went.

Does anyone else find it odd that Microsoft touted support for ODF then pushed back supporting OOXML to the next version of Office just before all these complaints landed on ISO's doormat?

This, to my mind, shows two things:

1. Microsoft believes these appeals/complaints are likely to succeed;
2. they certainly have paid shills in a number of ISO committees, otherwise they wouldn't have seen this coming;

Apparently representatives from Microsoft were stalling for time in Brazil. So the support for ODF In Office seems like firefighting more than anything. The dropping of the Microsoft project, encoding books to OOXML, would also seem to be a sign that Microsoft is giving up.

*joke* If these appeals are successful, I for one will be on Alex Brown's blog, posting this video of Kryten in 'smug mode'. Muahaha. */joke*

If you want to see how bad was this process handled, see one of its awfuls deliverables.

Open the document "Response_DE-0028_dates_v9.doc" in this zip

http://www.itscj.ipsj.or.jp/sc34/open/0989_reference_docs.zip

This is one of the changes frenetically accepted in BRM, regarding treatments of dates in OOXML. See the salad of colors trying to explain the modifications. And this is a fix ( BRM ) of a fix ( one of ECMA 1027 proposed fixes ) of a NB comment of a draft text ( original ECMA submission ).

And this document contradicts this another BRM document: http://www.itscj.ipsj.or.jp/sc34/open/0989.pdf because the first says that the .DOC file replaces ECMA responses 18 and 43 but the "Response_DE-0028_dates_v9.doc" document says that it replaces ECMA responses 18, 43, 76 and 690 !

ECMA and Microsoft have not provided a final text with all this changes applied. In the BRM they frenetically changed Scope, Conformance , Schemas , and lot of normative text. Microsoft is now rushing to get a final text in less than one month, to comply with ISO normative.

This is how ISO delivers IT international standards, mandating fundamental changes to drafts, leaving national bodies with the only alternative to cast a political vote leaving aside the technical content of the specification.

Congratulations to the countries that had *balls* and didn't agree with this way of deliver standards to people:

• New Zealand ( dissaproved )
• Brasil ( dissaproved )
• India ( dissaproved )
• China ( dissaproved )
• South Africa ( dissaproved )
• Canada ( dissaproved )
• Venezuela ( dissaproved )
• Ecuador ( dissaproved )
• Iran ( dissaproved )
• Italy ( abstained )
• Spain ( abstained )
• Belgium ( abstained )
• Netherlands ( abstained but only Microsoft opposed the disapproval )
• France ( abstained due to heavy Microsoft pressure )
• Malaysia ( abstained due to heavy Microsoft pressure )
• Australia ( abstained due to heavy Microsoft pressure, government opposed OOXML )
• Kenya ( abstained )

And congratulations Microsoft, your friendly little countries supposedly experts in XML document description languages ;-) ( now ISO P-members ), who joined ISO JTC1 just to cast an unconditional-yes-votes payed off:

• Jamaica
• Cyprus
• Malta
• Kazakhstan
• Lebanon
• Azerbaijan
• Cote-d'Ivore
• Pakistan

If you want to see how bad was this process handled, see one of its awfuls deliverables.

Open the document "Response_DE-0028_dates_v9.doc" in this zip

http://www.itscj.ipsj.or.jp/sc34/open/09891.pdf

This is one of the changes frenetically accepted in BRM, regarding treatments of dates in OOXML. See the salad of colors trying to explain the modifications. And this is a fix ( BRM ) of a fix ( one of ECMA 1027 proposed fixes ) of a NB comment of a draft text ( original ECMA submission ).

ECMA and Microsoft have not provided a decent final text with all this changes applied. In the BRM they frenetically changed Scope, Conformance , Schemas , and lot of normative text. Microsoft is now rushing to get a final text in less than one month, to comply with ISO normative.

This is how ISO delivers IT international standards, mandating fundamental changes to drafts, leaving national bodies with the only alternative to cast a political vote leaving aside the technical content of the specification.

Congratulations to the countries that have balls and didn't agree with this way of deliver standards to people:

• New Zealand ( dissaproved )
• Brasil ( dissaproved )
• India ( dissaproved )
• China ( dissaproved )
• South Africa ( dissaproved )
• Canada ( dissaproved )
• Venezuela ( dissaproved )
• Ecuador ( dissaproved )
• Iran ( dissaproved )
• Italy ( abstained )
• Spain ( abstained )
• Belgium ( abstained )
• Netherlands ( abstained but only Microsoft opposed the disapproval )
• France ( abstained due to heavy Microsoft pressure )
• Malaysia ( abstained due to heavy Microsoft pressure )
• Australia ( abstained due to heavy Microsoft pressure )
• Kenya ( abstained )

• Jamaica
• Cyprus
• Malta
• Kazakhstan
• Lebanon
• Azerbaijan
• Cote-d'Ivore
• Pakistan

Finally: the details about the final results of the BRM

You're still off...

1. The 900 change block vote (the 80% that were not discussed) passed based on approve/disapprove votes, but only by counting votes from non P attendees.
2. There is disagreement about whether non P attendees were entitled to vote on this ballot, under ISO rules.
3. The consensus is settling toward the non P vote being against ISO rules.

P-members ("P" as in participant) are the ones with the right to vote. O-members ("O" as in observer) have the right to attend meetings, receive documents, make suggestions, but they don't have the right to vote (in general). The votes in the BRM were counted for both P and O members, when according to the directives, only P members should be counted. Here the situation is well explained, the rules seem clear to me, but ISO stands on the grounds that the decision to allow O members to vote was right.

Personally, I don't see much problem with O members voting, many of those that were at the BRM were working really hard, Brazil is a good example, you can see from the blog of one of the delegates. Disallowing O member votes would also only disapprove around 100 of the 900 approved resolutions (some preliminary accounts were suggesting that all of them would be disapproved). And also, although OOXML is a terrible specification, I don't think the technical issues are the most relevant here, I believe the standard should be disapproved even if the text was perfect, on the basis that there is already another standard for the exact same purpose.

Even if I don't think O members voting was a problem, breaking the rules was a problem. If ISO breaks the process, then how can they promote such things as ISO 9001, which is all about the processes themselves?

No. Abstentions are normal, specially on issues that only some countries have the knowledge of the issue. For instance, I read that for bidirectional writing, only Israel has the expertise, and most other countries cannot really have an opinion on it, because most of them don't really know anything about it.

The real problem is that the issue should not be decided by vote, but by consensus. Many delegates tried to raise that issue, and I even read that India's delegate expressed his indignation to travel to Geneva using government and public resources to fill a paper ballot, which he could very well have done without the need of travelling. Here's another account on the sad decision to vote the resolutions.

You flaws 1 and 2 also applied to the ODF ISO standardization.

Not true. ODF standardization by ISO didn't use the fast-tracking process, it was done by the PAS (Publicly Available Specification), which allows the appropriate time for scrutiny of a standard, differently of a fast-tracking process, which is supposed to ratify a de facto standard, which OOXML isn't at all. If you want more details, read Fast Track versus PAS.

Also, from Wikipedia, you can see that the work on ODF started in December 2002 in OASIS, it was approved by OASIS as a standard in May 2005, was submitted as a PAS to ISO in November 2005 and "after a six-month review period, on May 3, 2006 OpenDocument unanimously passed its six-month DIS ballot in JTC1, with broad participation, after which the OpenDocument specification was approved for release as an ISO and IEC International Standard under the name ISO/IEC 26300:2006". If that's not enough scrutiny, I don't know what is.

(And it needed fixing...see the massive changes in ODF 1.2 and compare to 1.0)

Not true. The changes in newer versions of ODF are evolution of the standard. New features are being introduced. Version 1.1 introduced accessibility features. Version 1.2 introduces metadata capabilities, which allows the use of ODF in the semantic web.

So why is Microsoft being required to operate under different rules?

Actually, Microsoft is playing by their own rules, but not in the sense you imply. The rules for fast-tracking seem to have been written specially for OOXML.

People seem to want theirs to be flawless before allowing it to be an ISO standard--a requirement no one else has been subject to.

You're making a lot of false statements on ODF, I wish you could back them out. You base your whole line of thought on the assumption that OOXML is following the same process than ODF, which is completely false, as all the links I included here will show. Agreed, the links are from ODF backers, but it's clear that Microsoft wouldn't start making these comparisons, it only shows how they're abusing a process to have their way.

However, even if Microsoft would submit it as a PAS, after reviewing and finishing it in ECMA, and even if they didn't use dirty tricks to try to approve their standard, it should never be considered for standardization anyway! The thing about standards is that, unless everybody uses the same standard for the same purpose, they're irrelevant. They only solve problems if they're adopted. There already is a standard for office documents, it's ODF.

Instead of promoting their own, on the basis that it provides legacy compatibility (fallacy, otherwise there would be tables on how to convert binary documents), and that standards should compete (fallacy, products should compete, they should all use the same standard so that you can move from one product to the other and take all your documents with you, you would choose products based on features and would not be locked into any vendor), Microsoft should instead just adopt ODF.

The argument that ODF is insufficient for MS Office is a fallacy as well, because ODF supports extensions, and for versions 1.1 and 1.2 (or 1.3, there's still time!) Microsoft could indicate exactly what they think is needed in ODF to support conversion from legacy formats. Microsoft is part of OASIS, they were actually invited to cooperate on ODF when the process started, but they refused. ODF proponents would certainly be interest