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UK Agency Files OOXML Complaint, EU Demurs
Christopher Blanc writes to let us know that although BECTA, the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency, has filed a complaint with EU regulators about Microsoft's business practices, the European Commission won't be doing anything particular about it. BECTA claimed that the OOXML format discourages competition. BECTA lodged a similar complaint with the UK Office of Fair Trading last October. A Commission press officer said, "We are already looking into the issues raised in that complaint already and we are not treating it as a formal complaint to us."
For those that don't know Becta is a UK organisation that acts to advice the nations schools on their IT strategies.
It doesn't have any formal powers from what I understand in forcing schools to or not to use certain technologies however it does produce a list of Becta authorised providers which some schools will choose only to work with.
That said it has a lot of power in the UK educational arena and has always been quite pro-open source on many occasions, it's still recommending against Office 2007 in schools and as such has been quite successful in warding many schools off switching to Office 2007.
It's not the most powerful organisation there is and it doesn't really have any power over standards, but it's very influental in UK education and if Microsoft pisses them off enough I could very well imagine them making an ever stronger drive towards open source to the point they will likely put together resources that make it easy for schools to make the switch.
Some areas of local goverment, schools and in some cases, university policy is largely based around what Becta recommends in the UK.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
OOXML isn't open due to the poor quality of the specification. Where the specification is vague or completely undefined it means that defacto standards will step in and that's how Microsoft Office maintains its monopoly. Here's my list of example remaining problems in OOXML that will result in the ISO promoting a defacto commercial application, Microsoft Office.
-Docvert converts MSWord to OpenDocument, clean HTML
Hi,
They've either documented or removed those 'behaveLikeWW8' style flags. As engineering criteria however the documentation hasn't been reviewed to see whether it accurately describes Microsoft Office, and it was added late in the process (early 2008, I think).
What remains however are Microsoft OLE references without documentation or patent coverage, accessibility problems, and huge areas of OOXML entirely without documentation that mean that ISO OOXML promotes defacto standards.
Read my blog for a few posts on how no one voting on OOXML saw a final specification.
-Docvert converts MSWord to OpenDocument, clean HTML
Actually, the article is FUD. Becta never asked that it's complaint be
treated as a new complaint. It asked that it be added to the already
existing complaint regarding OOXML. It has been.
Here is what Becta said in its statement announcing it had sent its
complaint already filed with the UK antitrust regulator to the EU
Commission:
"Following discussions with the OFT, Becta has now referred its interoperability complaint and related evidence to the European Commission in support of the Commission's wider investigation."
Someone decided to write an article as if Becta had been denied its
complaint as being redundant. That isn't accurate. It was added to
the other complaint about OOXML, which is *exactly what Becta asked for*.
Somehow it gets turned around and described as some kind of Microsoft
victory.
Disgusted you say? Ditto.