ISO Puts OOXML On Hold

schliz alerts us that ISO, in response to the four appeals (Venezuela, India, Brazil, South Africa) filed in recent weeks, has put the OOXML standardization process on hold. Here is ISO's press release, which says that ISO/IEC DIS 29500 will not be published for at least "several months" while the appeals process goes forward.
Update: 06/11 10:13 GMT by KD : Reader Alsee points out that the fourth officially recognized appealing country is Venezuela, not Denmark as originally stated. The protests of Denmark and Norway are being disregarded, as they do not come from the administrative heads of their national organizations.

Comments

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

They didnt make any "decision" at all. From TFA:

According to the ISO/IEC rules, a document which is the subject of an appeal cannot be published as an ISO/IEC International Standard while the appeal is going on. They're just doing what they have to.

Re:Well done, ISO!

[Anonymous Coward]

I applaud ISO for recognizing the evaluation of the technical community it servers.

Heh, good one! The fast track process was completely inappropriate for OOXML. With 9 months to review 6000 pages the technical community had only scratched the surface of what's broken in OOXML.

No one in the technical community is happy with the quality of OOXML -- even Microsoft can't implement this thing.

ISO wrote:

According to the ISO/IEC rules, a document which is the subject of an appeal cannot be published as an ISO/IEC International Standard while the appeal is going on. Therefore, the decision to publish or not ISO/IEC DIS 29500 as an ISO/IEC International Standard cannot be taken until the outcome of the appeals is known.

This statement has no bearing on the similar statements issued by South Africa and Brazil in their formal appeals that they should have received a final text by now. National Bodies should have received a final text but this is quite different to publishing (which is all the ISO are talking about in that final paragraph).

Section 13.12 of the directives reads,

"In not more than one month after the ballot resolution group meeting the SC Secretariat shall distribute the final report of the meeting and final DIS text in case of acceptance."

The BRM was in February and the final text was due in late March. It still has not arrived. You might call this evidence of the OOXML text being in an unreleasable state (read: a mess) and South Africa would agree...

"Given the magnitude of the specification and the number of identified edits required it was clear that this directive [13.12] could not have been met. This is the clearest possible indication that DIS 29500 as submitted by Ecma and as modified by the BRM is not ready for fast track processing." -- http://tinyurl.com/4ceags

Denmark did NOT protest!

[SplatMan_DK]

Please let us get the facts straight here.

Denmark did not protest, appeal, or in any way change its official vote. The official Danish ISO vote is controlled by Dansk Standard, who voted "Yes" in the final OOXML specification vote (after initially voting "No with comments").

The reason Denmark keeps sneaking into the list of countries who "appealed" is probably because a local pro-Open Source lobby organization named "Foreningen for Open Source Leverandører i Danmark" (OSL) (their name in English is "The Danish Open Source Business Association") has submitted a protest and that is by many people mistakenly translated into an "official appeal".

Since the protest is not submitted by Dansk Standard (who holds the official ISO vote) but is in fact from a local lobby organization, the vote can not be considered "official" in any way. And it is important to note in this context, that the official Danish vote is still "Yes".

The protest is available in Danish on the OSL website and I also found a copy of the letter in English on Groklaw (its not on the OSL website for some reason). The original Groklaw artikle on the subject is here, in case you want to read the comments yourself.

The complaint criticises both the way Dansk Standard handled the OOXML approval process and a few formal errors in the ISO process.

The story was first announced by Computer World Denmark (Danish only, sorry). It was first mentioned on slashdot on June 1st where sadly it was also mistakenly described as an "official" protest.

- Jesper