Microsoft Spins Negative OOXML Result

Classic Microsoft press release here on the OOXML decision under the upbeat heading "Strong Global Support for Open XML as It Enters Final Phase of ISO Standards Process":

Today the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) released the results of the preliminary ballot to participating National Body members for the ISO/IEC DIS 29500 (Ecma 376 Office Open XML file formats) ratification process. The results show that 51 ISO members, representing 74 percent of all qualified votes, stated their support for ratification of Open XML. Along with their votes, the National Bodies also provided invaluable technical comments designed to improve the specification. Many of the remaining ISO members stated that they will support Open XML after their comments are addressed during the final phase of the process, which is expected to close in March 2008.

Sounds almost like a "yes" - but note: no mention of the crucial "P" votes, and even the 74 percent is insufficient according to ISO rules:

Although no date has been formally set, the final tally is likely to take place in March 2008. ISO/IEC requires that at least 75 percent of all "yes" or "no" votes (qualified votes) and at least two-thirds of "P" members that vote "yes" or "no" support ratification of a format in the Fast Track process.

So we'll take that as a "no", then?

More analysis once we get all the details of how people voted, and how many comments there are, which together will show just how much of a "non" it was. One thing is certain: now begins the real work to make sure that the vote in March is fair and not bought.

Decoupling Software and Standards

As you may have noticed, there is a big bust-up over office file formats going on at the moment. On the one hand, we have ODF, which is a completely open, vendor-independent standard that is supported by multiple programs, and on the other, we have Microsoft's OOXML, which is a vendor-dependent standard of sorts, unlikely to be fully implemented by anyone other than Microsoft.

The only reason this debate is taking place is because of the huge installed base of Microsoft Office, which is naturally biased towards OOXML. But with the release of Sun's ODF Plug in 1.0 for Microsoft Office, things have changed:

The Sun ODF Plug in for Microsoft Office gives users of Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint the ability to read, edit and save to the ISO-standard Open Document Format. The ODF Plug in is available as a free download from the Sun Download Center (SDLC). Download the ODF Plug in.

The Plug in is easy to setup and use, the conversion happens transparently and the additional memory footprint is minimal. Microsoft Office users now can have seamless two-way conversion of Microsoft Office documents to and from Open Document. The ODF Plug in runs on Microsoft Windows and is available in English. More language support will be available in later releases.

This is important, because it decouples the file format from the program. Now anyone - including Microsoft Office users - can opt for a truly open format, not one that aspires to this condition.

We can only hope that the UK's National Archives, making an extraordinary amount of noise about solving a problem largely of Microsoft's making, will use the new plug-in to convert files stored in proprietary formats into the safest long-term solution - ODF.

What Davos Can Teach Us

The World Economic Forum is a fairly disgusting dance of power and money, but even in this context intelligent observers can learn something useful. For example, here are Brian Behlendorf's thoughts on the problems of getting people to understand and engage with true openness:

On the downside: twice, I mentioned ODF vs. OOXML in conversations with people, and each time, there was a lack of awareness of the issue. I really don't want to embarrass them so I won't name names, but they were people who really should have known; one was a leader of a business that has been around for years and has serious document management and longevity issues, the other a government official who was charged with preserving his country's culture but sadly non-technical. In both cases, the initial response was along the lines of "this is a mess that you techies have created, I expect you to clean it up", as if it was simply a matter of defects in code that a company like Microsoft would be cleaning up quickly. If it turned out that valuable company data from 1993 were in a Word file format that couldn't be properly read by Office 2008, then they'd simply hire someone or a firm to dive in and repair it by hand. I believe I brought both of them around to understanding how it's not just a matter of bugfixing or outsourcing the problem, that it is a knowlege and institutional threat, and the role they need to play as informed customers in pressuring vendors to do the right thing. But, Microsoft's judo-move with OOXML of appearing to do the "right" thing that isn't actually right in practice has more power than I think you or I would wish were true.

Microsoft Using NGOs in India to Lobby for OOXML?

If this is true - and I have no reason to think it isn't - then I predict that it will come back to bite Microsoft very badly one day:

Mail from Microsoft India's Corporate Social Responsibility group to the NGO

As per our discussion please find attached the draft letters -­ please cut/edit/ delete and change it any which way you find useful. Also attached is the list of NGOs who have sent the letters. And attached is also a document that details wht (sic) this debate is all about. Look forward to hear from you in this regard. In case you decide to send the letters, can you please send me a scan of the singed (sic) letters that you send out. Thanks this will help me track the process.

Thanks

Form letters on OOXML sent by Microsoft to NGOs

To

Mr. Jainder Singh, IAS
Secretary
Department of IT
Ministry of Communications & IT,
Electronics Niketan
CGO Complex
New Delhi - 110 003

Respected Sir

Please write a paragraph about your organization

Please paraphrase "We support OXML as a standard that encourages multiplicity of choice and interoperability giving us the ultimate consumer the choice. * recognizes that multiple standards are good for the economy and also for technical innovation and progress in the country, especially for smaller organizations like us, who require choice and innovation"

Please write about your work

Please paraphrase "*** also supports OXML as this does not have any financial implications thus releasing our resources for welfare and development of society."

Thanking You

Yours Faithfully

Name Designation

(Via Open Source India.)

Andy Updegrove on the War of the Words

The ODF/OOXML struggle has been one of the pivotal stories for the world of open source, open data and open standards. I've written about here and elsewhere many times. But the person best placed to analysis it fully from a standards viewpoint - which is what it is all about, at heart - is undoubtedly Andy Updegrove, who is one of those fine individuals obsessed with an area most people find slightly, er, soporific, and capable of making it thrilling stuff.

News that he's embarked on an e-book about this continuing saga is therefore extremely welcome: I can't imagine anyone doing a finer job. You can read the first instalment now, with the rest following in tantalising dribs and drabs, following highly-successful precedents set by Dickens and others. With the difference, of course, that this book - entitled ODF vs. OOXML: War of the Words - is about fact, not fiction, and that the events it describes have not even finished yet.

WordPerfect Does ODF - Finally

Still hedging its bets somewhat, Corel has finally done it:

Corel Corporation (NASDAQ:CREL; TSX:CRE) today announced that Corel WordPerfect Office will be updated to support new XML-based file formats, the OASIS Open Document Format (ODF) and Microsoft Office Open XML (OOXML).

Better late than never.

Telling the Truth About a Telling Fact

Rob Weir has a characteristically sharp and original analysis of the recent approval by ECMA of Microsoft's Open Office XML:

Thus the remarkable achievement of Microsoft and Ecma TC45, who not only managed to create a standard an order of magnitude larger than any other markup standard I've seen, but at the same time managed to complete the review/edit/approve cycle faster than any other markup standard I've seen. They have achieved an unprecedented review/edit/approval rate of 18.3 pages/day, 20-times faster than industry practice, a record which will likely stand unchallenged for the ages.

I think we would all like to know how they did it. Special training? Performance enhancing drugs? Time travel? A pact with the Devil? I believe you will all share with me an earnest plea for them to share the secret of their productivity and efficiency with the world and especially with ISO, who will surely need similar performance enhancements in order for them to review this behemoth of a standard within their "fast track" process.

I am optimistic, that once the secret of OOXML's achievement gets out, the way we make standards will never be the same again.

IBM Fires a Shot Across the ISO's Bows

I've written before about the parlous state into which the once-irreproachable ISO has fallen, particularly with its flagrant disregard of the concerns of major developing countries like India and Brazil during the OOXML standardisation process. Pointing out the ISO's flaws is easy enough, but fixing them is more problematic. It seemed likely that much of the impetus would come from those countries that have been marginalised by the ISO, but things have just got much more interesting with the announcement of IBM's new “IT Standards Policy” which addresses precisely these issues....

On Open Enterprise blog.

Is Silverlight for GNU/Linux Moonshine?

Hm, don't know what to think about this:

Over the last few months we've been working to enable Silverlight support on Linux, and today we are announcing a formal partnership with Novell to provide a great Silverlight implementation for Linux. Microsoft will be delivering Silverlight Media Codecs for Linux, and Novell will be building a 100% compatible Silverlight runtime implementation called "Moonlight".

Moonlight will run on all Linux distributions, and support FireFox, Konqueror, and Opera browsers. Moonlight will support both the JavaScript programming model available in Silverlight 1.0, as well as the full .NET programming model we will enable in Silverlight 1.1.

I suppose it depends on how open the specification is - and whether it's just OOXML by any other name....

Anyone any thoughts?

Setting Standards

As the world of computing moves to embrace openness in all its forms, open standards are becoming increasingly important – and the battles over them increasingly dirty, as the OOXML standardisation process has shown. One of the most vexed issues within open standards is the place of patents....

On Open Enterprise blog.

What's Up, UOF Doc?

The battle for the soul of the document is usually presented as a two-horse race between ODF and OOXML. But that's a very parochially Western view of things - there is, after, a third format available: UOF, China's "Uniform Office Document Format", which I've written about several times before. If, like me, you were wondering what's happening in that world, he's a short update from Andy Updegrove.

ISO Ill at Ease Over OOXML

On Open Enterprise blog.

The Smell of Conspiracy Theories in the Morning

Lovely:

The truth can now be told. We have a nine-floor complex beneath Devil's Tower in Wyoming, Dick Cheney's home state. We employee three-hundred Oompa Lumpas, ostensibly here on student visas, to read through the 6,000 page OOXML specification. They then input their concerns into a massively parallel computer, based on the old Deep Blue chess computer that beat Gary Kasparov. The computer takes the objections, formats them into English, inserting random literary quotes from The Modern Library of the World's Best Books, and then posts them in blogs and press articles. The computer can express these objections in the form of sonnets, haikus, or even as crude limerick. Every year on January 14th (Thomas J. Watson's Birthday) at 3:14am the Oompa Lumpas come to the surface, smear their bodies with blue paint, dance around a bonfire, howl at the moon and entreat the gods to vanquish their foes, mainly Microsoft, who canceled their favorite application, Microsoft Bob. Rob Weir doesn't really exist. He is just a subroutine. As they say, "On the internet, nobody knows your are a subroutine processing data input by Oompa-Loompas working for IBM underground in Wyoming"

But is it just coincidence that the time quoted in this extract - 3.14 - happens to be precisely the Köchel number of the Flute Concerto by Mozart that is almost certainly the lost Oboe concerto written for Ferlendis? I don't think so....

A Victory (of Sorts) for e-Petitions

It's easy to be cynical about 10 Downing Street's e-petitions (I should know). But here's a case where it might even have done some good.

Thank you for your e-petition, which asks that The National Archives convert its electronic records to Open Document Format rather than Microsoft Open XML Format, in order to make them accessible to users.

The National Archives is committed to preserving electronic records that are both authentic, and easily accessible by users. Wherever possible, records are made available online in a format which can be accessed using any standard web browser. Electronic records transferred to The National Archives are always preserved in their native format; if the native format is not suitable for online access then a separate ‘presentation’ version is created. No single format can address the diversity of electronic records held by The National Archives. At present, documents transferred in Microsoft Office formats are converted to Portable Document Format for online access. PDF is an international standard (ISO 32000-1: 2008) and is supported by all major browsers, either natively or via freely available plug-ins. The National Archives does not currently plan to convert any records to Microsoft Office Open XML format.

It's the last bit that's important: there were rumours circulating that some dark deal was being done to lock up the Archives in OOXML. For the moment we seem safe....

How Microsoft Fought True Open Standards II

In yesterday's post about Microsoft's lobbying of the Cabinet Office against truly open standards based on RF licensing, I spent some time examining the first part of a letter sent by the company on 20 May last year. The second part concentrates on the issue of open standards for document exchange. This touches on one of the most brutal episodes in recent computing history - the submission of Microsoft's OOXML file format to ISO for approval. 

On Open Enterprise blog.

German Federal Government to Support ODF

Nicht slecht:

Der IT-Rat der Bundesregierung hat beschlossen, das offene Dokumentenformat ODF (ISO 26300) in der Bundesverwaltung schrittweise einzusetzen.

Staatssekretär Dr. Hans Bernhard Beus, Beauftragter der Bundesregierung für Informationstechnik und Vorsitzender des IT-Rats, bezeichnete die Entscheidung als „wichtigen Schritt, um den Wettbewerb zwischen den Software-Herstellern zu fördern, die IT-Sicherheit zu stärken und die Interoperabilität zu verbessern, denn offene Dokumentenformate werden vollständig und regelmäßig veröffentlicht.“

Bürgern, Unternehmen und anderen Verwaltungen wird damit künftig der Dokumentenaustausch mit der Bundesverwaltung auch im ODF-Format eröffnet. Die Behörden des Bundes werden spätestens ab Anfang 2010 in der Lage sein, diese Dokumente zu empfangen und zu versenden, zu lesen und auch zu bearbeiten.

[Via Google Translate: The IT Council of the Federal Government has decided to open the document format ODF (ISO 26300) in the federal administration only gradually.

State Secretary Dr. Hans Bernhard Beus, Federal Government for Information Technology and chairman of the IT Council, described the decision as "a major step to increase competition among software vendors to promote the IT security and strengthen the interoperability to improve because open document formats will be fully and regularly published."

Citizens, businesses and other administrations will enable future exchange of documents with the federal administration in the ODF format opened. The federal authorities are beginning no later than 2010 in a position to provide this documentation to receive and send, read and edit.]

The move will be rather slow and circumspect (well, this is Germany), and there's also the danger that OOXML will get a look-in, too, now that it nominally "open" (thanks for nothing, ISO). Still, on the whole this announcement is a good message to send to German citizens and to other governments.

Dysfunctional ISO - Courtesy of Microsoft

This is an extraordinary testimony to the havoc wrought by Microsoft on parts of ISO through its attempts to get OOXML (aka ECMA 376) fast-tracked:

This year WG1 have had another major development that has made it almost impossible to continue with our work within ISO. The influx of P members whose only interest is the fast-tracking of ECMA 376 as ISO 29500 has led to the failure of a number of key ballots. Though P members are required to vote, 50% of our current members, and some 66% of our new members, blatantly ignore this rule despite weekly email reminders and reminders on our website. As ISO require at least 50% of P members to vote before they start to count the votes we have had to reballot standards that should have been passed and completed their publication stages at Kyoto. This delay will mean that these standards will appear on the list of WG1 standards that have not been produced within the time limits set by ISO, despite our best efforts.

Unless ISO tightens up on its rules, and removes or demotes, P members who do not vote as required by ISO rules I would recommend my successor that it is perhaps time to pass WG1’s outstanding standards over to OASIS, where they can get approval in less than a year and then do a PAS submission to ISO, which will get a lot more attention and be approved much faster than standards currently can be within WG1. The disparity of rules for PAS, Fast-Track and ISO committee generated standards is fast making ISO a laughing stock in IT circles. The days of open standards development are fast disappearing. Instead we are getting “standardization by corporation”, something I have been fighting against for the 20 years I have served on ISO committees. I am glad to be retiring before the situation becomes impossible. I wish my colleagues every success for their future efforts, which I sincerely hope will not prove to be as wasted as I fear they could be.

(Via The Open Sourcerer.)

Has OOXML Broken the British Standards Institution?

On Open Enterprise blog.

I Came, ISO, I Didn't Conquer

The OOXML farce continues:

Four national standards body members of ISO and IEC – Brazil, India, South Africa and Venezuela – have submitted appeals against the recent approval of ISO/IEC DIS 29500, Information technology – Office Open XML formats, as an ISO/IEC International Standard.

...


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.

Sun Enables Open Source for Accessibility

Free software has tended to serve the leading edge of the computing community - hackers, etc. - first. General users have tended to follow later, and those with access problems after that. That allowed Microsoft to use the relatively poor support for these communities as a stick with which to beat ODF during the early stages of the ODf vs. OOXML battle in Massachusetts. Things have moved on, but it remains true that free software's support for all users, including those with disabilities, has lagged somewhat behind proprietary offerings.

On Open Enterprise blog.