RSSUS Standards Board Still Indeterminate on OOXML
By Scott M. Fulton, III | Published July 25, 2007, 12:09 PM
Earlier this week, the InterNational Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS - despite its name, a US technical advisory group for ANSI) confirmed what BetaNews reported a week ago: A two-thirds majority has yet to be reached among the committee's V1 technical review board, with regard to whether Microsoft's Office Open XML suite of formats should be recommended for approval to its Executive Board.
That approval would be a next critical step towards OOXML being officially recommended by the US delegation to the International Standards Organization, which is currently considering OOXML for worldwide adoption. For the Executive Board to recommend it, the V1 committee must approve it first. Though unofficial reports say more voting members currently approve than disapprove, INCITS requires a two-thirds majority vote of V1 members.
There is no official account of what goes on in an INCITS committee; however, Linux Foundation board member Andrew Updegrove wrote on Monday that he has been in communication with an unnamed V1 member, who gave a very replete explanation of the goings-on at INCITS. Suffice it to say that OOXML, contrary to reports elsewhere, was not defeated; and even if V1 never reaches consensus, the Executive Board could still end up approving OOXML's recommendation, although those chances would be diminished.
As the voting member told Updegrove, once news of the consensus failure reached the Executive Board, Microsoft argued that since 96 important members' concerns had already been successfully addressed, it should issue a ballot for approving the format's recommendation. It made a motion, which was probably a long shot (though Apple was officially the one that seconded it), and it was defeated.
However, the Board did agree to issue an approval ballot that would include some 400 additional comments that remain unaddressed, perhaps dealing with more serious technical issues and reservations that members may have.
Several meetings have already been scheduled throughout August for possibly resolving those issues, Updegrove reports. Then the Board has to meet a September 2 deadline for issuing its final recommendation. By that time, it would have to have either passed the approval ballot, or rejected that ballot and passed a subsequent ballot to recommend against the format.
Despite implications by IBM developer Rob Weir that the rapid increase in the V1 group's membership is due perhaps to clandestine influence from Microsoft, it will be the Executive Board which renders a final decision on or before the first week of September. Its membership has only recently increased by two, and one of those new members is Adobe.
The jackpot for Microsoft if all this manages to go its way after all, according to many reports, is a possible approval of OOXML by the State of Massachusetts, which originally set forth the whole debate about open standards in the public sector here. But a potentially bigger prize that hasn't received much press here isn't a state or a country but a continent: Last February, representatives of 21 European Union member states met in Berlin to discuss strategies for adopting "open document exchange formats."
There, they discussed a December 2006 document from the Pan-European E-Government Services Committee which advised modifications be made to the EU's 2004 recommendations for adopting open formats. In addressing those modifications, the Committee gave equal praise to Sun Microsystems and the OASIS standards group which represent OpenDocument Format, and Microsoft, for ensuring that their respective specifications "can be implemented by any interested party, including open-source developers, without additional obligations and/or costs."
The 2004 recommendations may have been among the first to urge Microsoft to follow OASIS in submitting its XML-based format suite to the ISO. Just the fact that Microsoft is urging on the ISO standardization process - despite whatever the final outcome may be - may have already made a deep enough impression among EU members to consider OOXML on an equal plateau with ODF. In other words, it may be the effort that counts in the end.
2:35 pm ET July 25, 2007 - In response to some of our concerns, Linux Foundation board member and attorney Andrew Updegrove offered some clarifications regarding the INCITS voting procedure from here.
Among the Executive Board, Updegrove says he confirmed, there will be only 16 voting members, despite the fact that 18 are listed on the organization's Web site. When the measure to approve the OOXML recommendation, with comments attached, comes up for a vote of the board, assuming there are no abstentions, only a simple majority is required. Thus if the vote is 9 votes yea, 7 nay, with no abstentions, the measure will be agreed to.
However, if there is at least one abstention, then the rules mandate there must be a two-thirds majority among the remaining votes for the measure to pass. Thus if the vote is 9 votes yea, 6 nay, with 1 abstention, the measure would fail. One abstention would require a flip of one of the nay votes to yea, for the measure to be agreed upon.
Updegrove added that it may actually no longer matter at this point what the V1 advisory committee decides in the end. "At this point, the V1 committee is no longer relevant, as I understand it," he told BetaNews. "It is in any case, I believe, advisory to the [Executive Board] rather than dispositive. So whatever the EB decides (if it decides something) will be what will be reported to ANSI."
Here's the relevant Updegrove snip:
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This issue may best be illustrated by the fact that most of the c. 17,000 already adopted ISO standards are only 25-40 pages long, and a standard normally takes three to four years to move through the five stages of a full ISO adoption cycle. In contrast, OOXML is over 6,000 pages long, and Microsoft is attempting to move it through both Ecma and ISO/IEC JTC1 in less than two years. Given the number of dependencies on other Microsoft technology, lack of detail describing some required elements, and other technical issues that have been identified, those charged with evaluating and voting on OOXML are having difficulty voting to approve, regardless of their opinion on whether there should or should not be two format standards.
Microsoft may have exacerbated this situation rather than eased it when it decided earlier this year to press forward without productively addressing the issues that were raised during the Contradictions period. Had it chosen to respond to these problems then, it could have shortened the list of issues that are troubling National Body representatives in the United States and elsewhere. I am told that Microsoft has continued its full court press in other National Bodies through the current review period, and has sought to cut comment periods in some countries in an effort to move as quickly as possible to a vote to approve.
Not only has this allowed even less time for responsible review of MS-OOXML, but this "cowboy" effort by a dominant United States IT company to force the local process (and often to populate it with its business partners) has not always sold well abroad. A more sensitive, locally-aware, collaborative approach might have worked better than the heavy handed strategy that appears to be backfiring in countries like Portugal and South Africa (and now India and Spain).
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|In the end, money talks. M$ will get thier garbage proprietary format approved as an ISO standard, eventhough there already is an ISO standard for Office documents.
I have zero confidence in the process actually working and it not getting approved.
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|Funny how open source zealots scream about the need for choice, until it's Microsoft offering an alternative.
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|Multiple standards is just incompatibility. Real choice is when any developer can write to one standard and then complete on price and quality.
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|"Real choice is when any developer can write to one standard and then complete on price and quality"
Don't you mean something like "real productivity". A "choice" by definition involves more than one thing.
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|Yet another human who doesn't understand the nature of a standard. ODF is; MS-OOXML is not.
MS-OOXML is a proprietary format and can only be accessed using Microsoft's commercial software under Microsoft's commercial OS.
That's choice?
ODF is a single open document format that can be used by everyone, and is not only used in 17 different word processors, but also within several online office apps like Google Docs, Zoho Office, et al. MS-OOXML? Just one, and it's owned by you know who and you got to pay them to access YOUR data. I ain't paying NO corporation for access to MY own copyrighted data — ever! However, you're welcome to until you wallet is empty.
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Rob Wier makes a good point:
What I want in a document format is:
(1) It is supported by my word processor.
(2) When I save the document and later retrieve it, the document looks and behaves the same.
(3) When I give it someone else, who may be using the same or a different word processor, on the same or a different operating system, it looks and behaves the same.
(4) It is easily processable by other software tools. I care about this directly because I am a programmer. But even if I were not, I would want this characteristic, since this is what ensures that an ecosystem of other tools will emerge to support the format, offering me more choice.
(5) I want the format to be open for the same reason, so it encourages the creation of other tools that I may later choose to use.
(6) I want the format to be controlled by a group of vendors and other interests, not dominated by a single player. Further, I'd want them to be to be working openly and transparently, so the public can all see what they are doing. We should all remember the line by Adam Smith, "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public." The remedy is given by Justice Louis Louis Brandeis in his line, "Sunlight is the best disinfectant."
(7) I want the format to be well-designed according to industry best practices, since I know that will make it easier to work with for tools vendors and will help ensure its longevity as a format.
Given a single format that can accomplish these goals, I see zero value in having a second standard. In fact, having multiple formats brings increased complexity and expense to the software vendor who maintains and supports all the translator code and this expense gets passed on to the consumer.
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That's REAL choice.
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|I mean consumers get to choose what product they want to buy because all the vendors work with the same data format. A standard gives choices to the consumer, proprietary formats leave customers locked in, without choices.
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