India Decides to Vote "No" For OOXML

Indian writes to mention that after an intense meeting at Delhi's Manak Bhawan the 21-member technical committee has decided to vote against Microsoft's Open Office Extensible Mark Up Language (OOXML) standard at the September meeting of the International Standards Organization (ISO). "Microsoft said it respects the government's decision. 'There were only three options "Yes", "No" and "Abstain" to be taken and we respect the government's decision,' Microsoft's legal affairs head Rakesh Bakshi said. He, however, added that India's 'No' vote will become a 'Yes' if Microsoft is able to resolve all technical issues with OOXML before the ballot resolution committee of ISO."

Comments

In related News: Germany will vote YES

[Alphager]

Germany's DIN has voted to vote YES (sorry, article in german) at ISO.

minor gripe

[farlukar]

Office Open XML, not Open Office

Oh goodie, MS has to patch bugs on a deadline

[SmallFurryCreature]

Well, that won't be problem. Everyone knows that when the shit has hit the fan and the crunch is on, the MS coders get their act together and just stamp out all the errors and publish a completly fixed solution.

Any of you buying this? Anyone? I don't think even a slashdot editor would fall for that line.

MS has worked on OOXML for a long time, and it still is a mess. Remind you of anything? Like say, everything else ever released by MS?

Maybe MS hopes that the ISO vote will be postponed until MS can release OOXML SP1. After all, that has always worked before. People delayed buying OS/2 because MS promised to release a new windows that would fix everything. People waited with finding alternatives to every single windows release with promise of better things to come.

You will see if MS gets their way if news emerges of the vote being delayed. If that happens, then MS has it in the bag. Then it no longer matters if they ever fix it, if you delayed to wait for a product, you gotta buy that product or admit you were wrong in waiting.

Re:Oh goodie, MS has to patch bugs on a deadline

[e6003]

Depending on one's definition of "technical problems" then there's a lot of patching to do because many of the problems are very deeply embedded. I don't just mean the infamous "auto space like Word 95" tags, but the lack of support for dates before 1900, the redefinition of the colourspace to clash with existing ISO standards and the hard-coded definition of non-working days to be Saturday and Sunday (which they are in Western culture but aren't in the Arabic world). A fairly comprehensive list of OOXML's failures is at http://www.grokdoc.net/index.php/EOOXML_Objections _Clearinghouse and it's an editable wiki as well.

Details on Indian campaign

[anivararavind]

Some quick links on Background of this campaign:

ODFAlliance India Mirror on Wordprocessing-ML subcommittee discussions

Issue List submitted to the Technical Committee by the WordProcessing ML Sub Committee

Why ECMA OOXML is not a Free Document standard :Paper By Dr. Nagarjuna

My Earlier Post : Defeat M$ efforts to push Ecma OOXML in Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) Economic Times Report says

"We unanimously agree on the disapproval of OOXML with comments. The same will be submitted to ISO," National Informatics Centre head and BIS technical committee chairperson Nita Verma said after a marathon meeting that lasted over six hours. There was no need for a voting as only Infosys Technologies and CSI supported Microsoft.

Shame on You Infosys

Re:Respect

[ozmanjusri]

Microsoft (or "M$", as your adult-self calls it) wasn't involved in the deal.

No, Microsoft's statement was:

"We provided no financial incentives to Paramount or DreamWorks whatsoever,"
Amir Majidimehr, head of Microsoft's consumer media technology group. Microsoft (and others) provided money to the HD DVD Promotion Group. The HD DVD Promotion Group provided money to the studios.

It's called "plausible deniability".

Re:score 1 for professionalism, correctness, carin

[JohnFluxx]

From the previous name "Star Office"

Re:123 countries vote for a standard

[ozmanjusri]

About 123 counties are participating in the vote. Does anyone here know which countries, and what they voted for, if they have voted already?

Some of those countries "participating" are observers.

This is the best explanation of the voting process I have seen.
http://www.robweir.com/blog/2007/02/merely-flesh-w ound.html

Re:Is ODF really much better?

[Twinkle]

ODF is fully specified, OOXML is not.

There's no comparison, ODF is a complete description of a document, OOXML has things like "use word 95 rules" or "important undocumented binary blob here". OOXML is a Trojan horse.

Re:How many no votes are needed? How many cast?

[Anonymous Coward]

2/3rds of actual votes (not counting abstentions) need to be Yes in order to pass

Re:"Technical Issues"

[Warbothong]

Your complaints are like telling a Linux hacker "It's not a bug, it's just that the wording on these buttons should be changed". To a Linux hacker everything is either a bug or some vague hand-wavey thing. To a technical committee everything is a technical issue or some vague hand-wavey thing.

Technical issues can be fixed by changing the text, whilst General Comments (vague hand-wavey things) will be taken on board. Everything you mention could be classed as a technical issue, even the existance of OOXML could be considered a technical issue with ODF (whether OOXML actually offers anything over ODF is debatable, but a serious technical discussion would take on board the points raised by the OOXML text and look for the best resolution. Of course, it is hard to have a serious technical discussion when Microsoft are paying most of the members). General comments can be useful too (for example, a general comment could ask voting members to keep in mind that there is not a single working implementation of OOXML, not even Microsoft Office supports it, thus the market dominance of Microsoft Office and the disruption caused by any change of this does not work in OOXML's favour any more than ODF's, since both can be implemented in Microsoft Office if Microsoft bothered to do it but at the moment neither are. This kind of thing is important to mention, even though it is not a problem with the text of the specification).

I would encourage anyone who can to send comments to their representative body, visit http://www.noooxml.org/ to find out yours (I live in the UK and sadly our deadline passed months ago)

Re:Is ODF really much better?

[Trelane]

If by fully specified, you mean "it completely avoided the formula issue", then yes.

False

It will be in ODF 1.2. What version of OOXML will address its critics' points?