Counter-Claims On Flaws In OOXML Meeting

ericatcw writes "Critics have charged that last week's ISO Ballot Resolution Meeting (BRM) to decide the fate of changes to Office Open XML standards proposal was too perfunctory and deviated from accepted ISO practices, possibly in an attempt to smooth the passage of the Microsoft format. This week, the ISO 'convener' of the BRM disputed those charges, saying that voting to dispose of 900 changes to the spec at once and allowing 'O' Observer countries to vote were the correct moves. ISO released a statement backing him up. Also, Patrick Durusau, editor of the competing OpenDocument Format specification and a late convert to OOXML's passage, also said that claims the process was flawed were overstated."

Comments

You can get more details about this process...

[Lorien_the_first_one]

Here:

http://consortiuminfo.org/

And Here:

http://www.groklaw.net/

Enjoy the links. I've been reading groklaw.net for about 5 years now. Worth every minute. I've been watching the OOXML/ODF process since the state of Massachusetts started talking about using some other format than MS Office. Dave Berlind broke the story on ZDNet.com of all places. I really enjoyed watching Microsoft and their allies work themselves up into a lather over the whole thing.

Seems that once governments started to think about lock-in, MS got interested in interoperability. I guess MS is really worried about shareholder lawsuits with claims that they didn't do *everything* they could to maintain share value. MS doesn't seem to get that the question for governments is how to maintain their sovereignty instead of MS shareholder value.

Re:You can get more details about this process...

[filbranden]

I also like Rob Weir's blog at http://www.robweir.com/blog/

Seems that once governments started to think about lock-in, MS got interested in interoperability.

Yeah, but it's Microsoft's way to interoperate, as usual... If they were really interested in interoperability, they would have implemented ODF as a first-class citizen in Office already.

Situation as I read it.

[moreati]

I read up a bit on this last weekend. I got the following impression:

1. The time allowed for the BRM (1 week) was fixed by ISO rules for a fast track standard
2. Attendees generally felt it was better to get most suggested changes in as were. It was better to make the changes even if they had reservations, rather than leave the text of MS OOXML in it's original form.
3. All Participants were genuinely trying to improve the standard, regardless of their stance on ODF vs MS OOXML. Better to fix it as much as possible now, inc case it does become approved.

The failings of this BRM seem to stem from the following:

1. MS OOXML is a voluminous body of text. There are a approx 6000 pages
2. MS OOXML is controversial. There were over a 1000 comments, many participants were not happy in many ways
3. MS and ECMA inappropriately tried to push OOXML as a fast track standard, given it's size and the controversy
4. ISO were not setup for a standards process where the participants are so combative. I'm not so sure on this one, just a feeling I got.

Re:Situation as I read it.

[filbranden]

Attendees generally felt it was better to get most suggested changes in as were. It was better to make the changes even if they had reservations, rather than leave the text of MS OOXML in it's original form.

Wrong. See what Head of US Delegation Frank Farance said here:

"Eighty percent of the changes were not discussed," said Frank Farance, head of the U.S. delegation [...]
"Virtually every comment we processed did not survive unedited," he said.

The greek delegate Antonis Christofides also said here that Canada had a list of cases where the ECMA resolution made the text worse than the original.

Re:Situation as I read it.

[filbranden]

How's that?

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?

The majority of attendees chose to abstain or cast no vote during the block vote itself. This brings into question how representative it was.

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.

Re:This process was flawed from the begining

[filbranden]

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