The Open XML debate resumes before the ISO

By Scott M. Fulton, III, BetaNews

February 25, 2008, 6:03 PM

As the world's principal standards body re-examines Microsoft's key applications standards format, one of ODF's chief proponents suggests the world will be better off if OOXML were to co-exist with ODF.

It may yet be approved as an international standard, but first, Microsoft's Office Open XML data format will need to withstand its most critical test to date: Beginning today in Geneva, and continuing on until Friday, 120 representatives of the world's national standards bodies will convene as ISO Subcommittee 34 to debate an estimated 1,100 separate issues, filtered from thousands of comments ranging from concerns to reservations, regarding whether Microsoft has done enough to bring OOXML up to their expectations.

The debate resumes on the heels of an important suggestion made by Patrick Durusau, an ardent supporter of the open-source ODF format, and a co-editor of ODF at both ISO and the OASIS standards body. Some weeks ago in an open letter (PDF available here), Durusau praised the standards process for having improved OOXML -- for doing, as he described, what the process was designed to do in the first place.

Last week, he followed that up with a retort to multiple criticisms of his initial letter. There, he went even further, suggesting that OOXML could continue to make strides through what he called a "co-evolution" with ODF, suggesting that perhaps the competitive atmosphere could do both standards a world of good.

"If we had a co-evolutionary environment, one where the proponents of OpenXML and OpenDocument, their respective organizations, national bodies and others interested groups could meet to discuss the future of those proposals," Durusau wrote last Tuesday (PDF available here), "the future revisions of both would likely be quite different. Co-evolution means that the standards will evolve based on the influence of each other and their respective user communities. Both remain completely independent and neither is subordinate to the other. What is currently lacking is a neutral forum in which proponents can meet and learn from each other."

In a long response posted to his standards blog yesterday, Linux Foundation board member and attorney Andrew Updegrove took an opposing view, suggesting that one of the roles of a modern standards agency is to promote and foster communication. And as such, the need to prevent communications from becoming anyone's proprietary process, becomes in Updegrove's view no less than a fundamental civil rights issue.

"We are entering an era in which IT technology is to society as earlier very different modalities were to human rights, from freedom of expression and free access to information...to civil rights...to freedom of religion," Updegrove wrote yesterday. "In this new interconnected world, virtually every civic, commercial, and expressive human activity will be fully or partially exercisable only via the Internet, the Web and the applications that are resident on, or interface with, them. And in the third world, the ability to accelerate one's progress to true equality of opportunity will be mightily dependent on whether one has the financial and other means to lay hold of this great equalizer."

At present, the ISO still lists OOXML as having achieved status 40.60 on its Standards Development Table. The magic number for this next week's debate will be 40.99, where Draft International Standard 29500 is moved for full registration as an FDIS -- not yet a standard, but well on its way. What Microsoft does not want to see is status 40.98, "Project deleted."

Still, the absolute fate of DIS 29500 may not be determined by well into next month, unless one of those 1,100 + criticisms swells into a firestorm that cannot be withdrawn.