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

Good news...

[Philotechnia]

The last time I looked at the OOXML spec, it was the most non-spec spec document I had ever seen. It was chock full of references to Microsoft's proprietary legacy code, failing to provide the details that would really allow for an open implementation. The only thing Microsoft opened up was letting developers know exactly what functionality they weren't being allowed to properly use. If this spec had been passed, it would have been an open invitation for more anti-spec specs down the road. Meanwhile, is it really a coincidence that with the advent of applications like OpenOffice, Office 2007 featured a complete revamp of the Office UI? Methinks not... Microsoft is the functional equivalent of that guy at the bar that can pick up just about any women he pleases, but is cursed with commitment issues that keep anything meaningful from developing. Bring something real to the table, billg.

Re:Good news...

[the_B0fh]

You may actually have a point, if Apple was trying to push whatever format keynote is, as a global *OPEN* standard.

Wait and see

[xra]

Won't be surprised if a MAJOR investment from Microsoft in India is announced in the coming weeks and coincidentally the indian opposition to OOXML softened...

In related News: Germany will vote YES

[Alphager]

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

Brazilian says no too!

[rsilva]

Same in Brazil:
Brazil says no
And OpenDocument is now a national standard!

Re:"Technical Issues"

[mrchaotica]

You know what the worst part is? Even if there weren't any "technical issues," OOXML shouldn't be a standard because ISO already has an existing standard covering the same thing! And that preexisting standard leverages other standards (eg. SVG, MathML) while Microsoft's travesty doesn't! So even regardless of "technical issues," making OOXML a standard is ludicrously stupid!

minor gripe

[farlukar]

Office Open XML, not Open Office

Re:minor gripe

[Fred_A]

I think it's because of the name MOO-XML (Microsoft Office Open XML) that India voted against, since they found it offensive.

score 1 for professionalism, correctness, caring

[Anderlan]

This is the Right Thing to have happened. MS OOXML is not a standard:

• 6000 pages and still not a complete standard
• paraphrased: 'to comply with standard, you must implement these hundreds of features from previous versions, which are not in this standard, and which may be covered by patent'
• WTF!?!

Further evidence of MS's bad faith:

• I had never really thought about it, but the standard is named to be confused with the Open Office standard. The MS non-standard is called OOXML (Office Open XML). The Open Office standard is called ODF (Open Document Format), but you might just as well call it OOXML (Open Office XML) (I did indeed call it that before this non-standard effort came from MS). All they did was switch the words 'open' and 'office' around! That's like calling a Linux distribution SoftMicro Windows LX and saying you don't intend to confuse anyone.

No need to worry...

[PinkyDead]

There's actually a simple XSL template that removes all the errors from the OOXML documents:

<xsl:template match='/'/>

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".

Kudos !!!

[unity100]

great. another indicator that india has a really developing and conscious i.t. crowd.

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:score 1 for professionalism, correctness, carin

[quantum bit]

How do you think "Open Office" came to get that name in the first place? From the same place that MS got their equally generically-named "Microsoft Office" product from - the place that people go to work.

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:"Technical Issues"

[MuffinSpawn]

They did this same sort of thing in the web services realm with WS-ResourceTransfer even though WS-ResourceFramework already existed and did everything WS-RT does. They claimed it was a merging of their stuff (WS-Transfer) with WS-RF, but it was really a coup. With WS-RT my original feeling was that they simply didn't want to recode everything to a new standard, so they just forced everyone to accept a superset of what they were using. That's annoying enough as it is, but I can't help thinking it's more than that despite my skepticism of conspiracies.

I can only assume that Microsoft's stance on the open source community is to simply use their clout to get everyone to use their specifications, thus making it seem like they're cooperating with others. In reality they're just forcing their Johny-come-lately garbage down everyone's throat as usual. Unfortunately people want Microsoft on board with standards, so they apparently keep getting duped into doing whatever Microsoft wants them to do in the spirit of pseudo-cooperation. Yes India said "no" to OOXML, but it was qualified with room for negotiation. Don't think that this is a win for open standards just yet. It's not an open standard if only one company gets to dictate what that standard is.

Re:"Technical Issues"

[burner]

"In reality they're just forcing their Johny-come-lately garbage down everyone's throat as usual"

It's worse than that.

Consider a manager making a decision of which implementation of a standard to use. Is that person going to select the implementation by the originator of the spec or an implementation by a third party? It's about using the standard to ensure market dominance and put any competition on uneven footing.