RSSNot Enough INCITS Voters Recommend Microsoft OOXML to ISO
By Scott M. Fulton, III | Published August 10, 2007, 8:41 PM
With the ballot having closed among members of Technical Committee V1 of the InterNational Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS) advisory board over whether to recommend Microsoft's Office Open XML format to the International Standards Organization as a standard, although more members voted aye than nay, an abstention by the IEEE forced the committee not to recommend it without comments.
The 8-7-1 vote deals a setback to Microsoft's hopes to be able to fast-track OOXML's approval by the ISO without being encumbrance. Due to the Committee's unorthodox rules, a 9-7 vote would have meant passage. But the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers' abstention actually dealt a more serious blow than if it had voted no, by kicking in a provision whereby a two-thirds majority of the remaining votes would have been required for the measure to pass: meaning, the vote would have to have been 10-5-1.
According to information provided to BetaNews by Linux Foundation board member and open source software attorney Andrew Updegrove, the eight yea voters were: Apple, the US Dept. of Homeland Security, the Electronic Industries Alliance, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Sony, and of course, Microsoft. Voting nay were: IT consulting firm Farance Inc., the US bar code industry standards group GS1 US, IBM, Lexmark, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Oracle, and the US Dept. of Defense.
The seven nay votes do not necessarily denote opposition to OOXML as a standard, although IBM's position on that matter is certainly part of the public record. V1 members will next have an opportunity to vote on whether to recommend OOXML to the ISO "with comments" - meaning, with members attaching their concerns and perhaps reservations about accepting OOXML as is.
This is a distinct possibility, especially after NIST issued a press release today saying it had voted for "conditional approval" of OOXML. That press release was probably premature, since it actually won't get an opportunity to formally characterize its position as such until the next round of balloting. Assuming a worst-case scenario where all other nay-voters are opposed and IEEE continues to abstain, the vote would be 9-6-1 - meaning one more nay-voter would have to join with NIST in favor of conditional approval.
Late today, IBM made its official opinion on the subject known in a long statement released through INCITS. Though portions appear to have been written in advance while other parts were assembled in haste, the company makes the point that Microsoft may be acting in violation of ISO rules in submitting a standard whose technological underpinnings would rely, or attempt to rely, on solely-held Microsoft patents and proprietary technologies.
Its case in point is a dramatic one: apparent applications by Microsoft for a patent on a type of footnote. BetaNews found the patent application to which IBM refers: Indeed, it's a July 2006 application yet to be granted, for a method of splitting up long footnotes referenced by one page that would otherwise consume more space than the page would otherwise allow.
By patenting a layout element, IBM contends, Microsoft may be forcing a standard for which its own development team is the principal, to depend not on vendor-neutral technology but upon the will - and the existence - of one company.
"This scenario warrants a few additional thoughts," IBM writes. "First, as the contributor of the specification, should Microsoft have any specific obligation to disclose licensing terms for patented inventions that are needed for implementation of OOXML but that are outside the Promise? Second, should the terms and conditions for such needed patent claims be identified before the specification is accepted? Third, should the same terms and conditions (including royalties) be made public and available to all implementers for such needed patent claims? Fourth, should there be some timing mechanism to discourage delay in asserting a needed patent claim (that is outside the Promise) and in disclosing its terms and conditions?"
IBM's argument could be the standards-body equivalent of lawyers for the defense sewing among the jury seeds for reasonable doubt. Today, it appears some of those seeds may have germinated.
In the end, the closed, patent laiden, horribly defined M$ format will still get approved. It is nice to hear about the speed bumps though.
M$ has tons of money, and in the end money talks as they bribe their garbage format through ISO approval.
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|That's exactly what's happening in Denmark, Portugal, and Chile, where Microsoft is giving all their software away for free for 30 years to those governments and any other takers who vote yes on the national bodies. It's really pretty sad, or pathetic, or both.
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|Totally minor thing but ISO doesn't stand for "International Standards Organization":
http://www.iso.org/iso/e...uction/index.html#three
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|The Microsoft standard is highly flawed, so I am glad to hear such news.
BTW, because of my doubts concerning OOXML decided to sign this petition: http://www.noooxml.org/petition IMO the point #6 of the petition should disqualify the standard for good.
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|Fine.
ODF will continue to be used by a very small niche market and Microsoft will just continue with the current standards. They'll just decide to ditch interoperability at all, they'll continue to dominate the market place and rake in the money. After all, in a world dominated by MS Office, it's OSS that needs the standards compatibility more than Microsoft.
At least with the ratification of OOXML, there was a chance to dent Microsofts dominance of the Office Suite market.
BUT AS USUAL because it was Microsoft, the Open Source Zealot brigade, blinded by their hatred, oppose it. Shame they're too stupid to recognise that in opposing it, all they're doing is handing Microsoft the excuse they want not to bother with an open standard.
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|I wrote that I strongly oppose OOXML because it does conform some really basic standards. I do not care if OOXML was made by Microsoft, Sun or IBM. I know that official standards should be chosen or implemented carefully because they should be in use for years or decades.
Microsoft never cares about standards, even it's own (some would say: particularly it's own). Microsoft is a member of W3C, however, both IE6 and IE7 do not utilise the standards of this organisation. What I find particularly funny IE7 - misinterprets some elements of Web pages written for IE6. When IE7 hit the market I saw some pages made by banks which did not accept IE7. It was not a mistake. The whole page had too be reviewed and checked if it works correctly with IE7.
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|Point no.1 is useless because duplicate standards are norm and explained in many of my posts before this one.
Point no. 2 is also moot as OASIS does not even submit a reference implementation for ODF and still get approved.
Point no.3 and 4. can be alleviated by submitting comments to the steering committee. Now if only those who opposed OOXML can do it without playing politics....
Point no.5. One acronym: RAND license.
Point no.6 (the so-called fatal flaw). This can also be rectified by submitting comments. If Microsoft does not want to do anything about this even after comments is filed the committee can act and not approve the standard. And there are no such thing such as 'disqualified for good". If OOXML is disqualified, Microsoft can rectify it and resubmit the standard again. And again. And again.......
Point no.7 is same as 6, 4 and 3.
Point no.8. C# is a Microsoft standard and here we got ISO/IEC 23270:2006. Fact: Vendor-standard are common. Adobe is in the process to standardize PDF, a format largely made by them, and no one seems to be complaining.
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|If all MS-OOXML's problems could be solved with "comments," then why did Microsoft fight so hard for FastTrack status? Why did Microsoft stack the national bodies with their business partners, which is the equivalent of buying votes? Why did Microsoft work behind the scenes during JTC1 to suppress all national body comments from the public? Finally, if Microsoft is only interested in publishing its "vendor spec," which is all MS-OOXML is, since its creation was not an open, public process by any measure, then why don't they do that? You do realize that the published proprietary MS-OOXML spec is not the actual MS-OOXML spec, don't you?
On the contrary for PDF, it is a fully published spec and companies have long had access to it for more than a decade. All Adobe has done up to this point is control its progress and versioning. Unlike MS-OOXML or .doc, when I use another app to convert a file to PDF, it actually converts accurately. Microsoft regularly breaks their DLL files to prevent proper conversion. If not, then there would be no need for MS-OOXML, only ODF, which is what MS-OOXML will eventually become in 3-4 versions, trust me.
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|Good points. I don't see future decades of office data — government, research, financial — being stored using MS-OOXML. When you sit down and start reading it, it's pretty clear that it's a feature dump, not an "open" standard by any measure.
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|An accepted ECMA standard did deserved to be included in a FastTrack lane. There are precedents for this, such as the aforementioned C# ISO standard. And what is the relationship between comments and Fast Track lane you want to tell me here? If this is not a Fast Track status, Oracle (enemy of Microsoft), NIST, and DoD would have switched their vote to Yes and Microsoft would have won comfortably.
BTW, Microsoft can't ignore comments, they risked getting rejected if they do.
And pray tell me, how did Microsoft stack national bodies with business partners? None of the national bodies voted yes in the INCITS vote, so I dunno what you are talking about.
And your opinion about PDF is simply wrong. Did you remember last time how Adobe prevented Microsoft from including PDF saving in Office 2007? This is proof that not all companies have access to PDF implementation, and that move by Adobe is illegal if PDF is an ISO standard, as an ISO standard must be available to anyone who wants to implement it. Microsoft then submitted XPS to ISO, forcing Adobe to do the same with PDF. Let me tell you, once PDF is ISO standard, the next Office suite will have PDF saving and Adobe can't do anything about it.
edit: And I have just found out why there are no reference implementation submitted to ISO for ODF. It turns out that even the flag-bearer for ODF which is Open Office, cannot even implements ODF standard perfectly. And conversions between Open Office and Koffice, the only 2 suites that have native support (converters does not count as even MS Office have those) are not in full fidelity as there are noticeable differences between those two when it comes to ODF implementations.
I have a question here. If ODF ISO standard is that easy to implement as many of you people claimed, why is that even Open Office cannot even implement ODF perfectly, just like Microsoft that also cannot implement OOXML perfectly?
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|Well, this is long from over. Denying FastTrack status should have happened back in March, but one woman at ISO rammed it through (can you say 'Microchusetts'?). The reality is that this is just one step in a long process. Reviewing Oracle’s technical comments against MS-OOXML (PDF) written for the national standards bodies is pretty shocking, especially if you follow their well-documented endnotes.
As Bob Sutor says (not exact quote): The more you read through the DIS 29500 (MS-OOXML) spec, the more you realize it is not a solid foundation for the next generation of office documents. Thus, when Microsoft their third version of an XML document format (MS-OOXML is the second), they will come up with something that looks a whole lot like ODF. I think we could save a whole lot of fuss and bother by just collaborating sooner rather than later, in my opinion.
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More reading beyond Groklaw:
Bob Sutor has posted a compendium of posts on why MS-OOXML is a bad idea.
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Glyn Moody: Why Microsoft Is Going Open Source
Microsoft is aiming to blunt the undeniable power of openness by hollowing it out. If OOXML is an open standard, and some of its own software licences become OSI-approved, Microsoft will be able to claim that it, too, is an open standard, open source company. For many busy managers, subject to all kinds of demands – including increasing pressure to “go open source” - the difference between Microsoft's open source and real open source won't matter, in the same way that the difference between Microsoft's open file formats and those of the OpenDocument Format won't really matter. In terms of keeping people happy, what matters for many is the label – the appearance of going open – and Microsoft's moves aim to provide just that.... In many ways this new approach is exactly the reverse of that espoused in the famous first Halloween Document. There, the idea was to “de-commoditise” open protocols by adding proprietary elements. Today, the technique is to pseudo-commoditise proprietary standards by getting them defined as open.
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Sam Hiser: Interoperability: Will the Real Universal File Format please Stand Up? (PDF, 9 pages, 123K)
Conclusion — The XML Cold War in a Changing Market for Software
To fully grasp the vendor lock-in and legal bind Microsoft and Novell are devising, it is important to understand how ISO/IEC ("ISO") adoption of EOOXML one or two years from now would result in a legally sanctioned extension of Microsoft’s monopoly in office document formats. Through its technology-sharing arrangement with Novell and its elaborate messaging around "interoperability," Microsoft audaciously seeks to reassert the old lock-ins while draping its behavior in the "open" language that is today in vogue.
The complete Special ODF Issue of Novatica | UPGRADE is here (PDF, 72 pages, 1.4M)
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|Wow! quite a lot of formatting
Looks nice, though. You must have used an editor for that ...
Anyway, back to the main issue, I'm kinda happy for this (very partial) victory for ODF, but I'm sure that unfortunately the Microsoft "standard" will be approved by ISO in the end :(
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|Where's Zaine?
I can't believe he's not commented on this yet ...
(Probably celebrating ... :D )
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|It's got to be embarrassing when six of their eight YEA votes come from Microsoft's own business partners and Microsoft itself. Voting for yourself and still losing; that's got to sting.
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|Why should Microsoft care? They pretty much own the corporate desktop and OSS is bending over backwards to be compatible with the current MS Office document standard. You don't see MS making a massive effort to support ODF do you?
OSS needs an open standard more than Microsoft. Nobody ever got fired for using MS Office...
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|Steve Jobs will take issue with you when you say Apple is in cahoots with Beastmaster Bill. And so are Sony who are enemies in the console field. In fact I am surprised that both votes alongside Microsoft with this. And Microsoft has done so very well at buying Department of Homeland Security.
GS1 US is also a surprise package at the NO camp as it was Microsoft IIRC who convinced them to to use Microsoft' Research works on barcodes.
Is it as if Microsoft is controlling who votes Yes and who votes No.
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|[computershack]: Why should Microsoft care?
Because more and more governments are mandating that open source software be used to store data. If you consider that a government's info/files/data, what have you, cannot afford to be held hostage by an american corporation, then you begin to see how desperate Microsoft has become to get their software labeled "open source," whether it really is or not.
Right now, they're doing everything possible to muddle everyone's thinking on open source, which is why you hear people saying: "Let's have a choice of standards!" That's fine until you ask Microsoft to include ODF in MS Office, then they get all pissy and say MS-OOXML can't be converted into ODF. But then, that betrays their own argument, since if MS-OOXML can't be converted, then the whole idea of "MS-OOXML converters" is a joke, right? If only ONE corporation/proprietary vendor can implement this "standard," then it's really not a standard at all, and should be plainly seen as such.
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|You can include ODF in Office, the way Abiword does it, which is with converters. Sheesh, you should have known that.
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