Brazil And India Appeal Microsoft’s OOXML Standard
Microsoft’s Open Office XML (OOXML) standard has been challenged by India, Brazil and South Africa, the International Electrotechnical Commission says.
Members of a Brazilian technical committee said the process that led to OOXML’s ratification was flawed, in part because not all participants were given enough time to make their views heard. The “fast-track” process in which OOXML was approved has been criticized. A blogger says rules were not followed, and Brazil has called the process approving OOXML flawed.
In a letter to the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), Brazil officials expressed disappointment over the group’s decision to give its approval to Microsoft’s Office Open XML format following a vote of member nations.
South Africa and India filed similar protests this week.
Despite the approval of Microsoft’s Open Office XML standard by two international standards bodies, the document format is not yet on stable ground. India and Brazil have joined South Africa in contesting the approval, standards officials revealed.
“By the deadline (Thursday), we had received three appeals, from Brazil, India and South Africa,” said Jonathan Buck, spokesperson for the International Electrotechnical Commission. The IEC, along with the International Organization for Standardization, is responsible for the technical committee that approved OOXML.
The IEC and fellow standards agency the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) will now spend 30 days evaluating whether the appeals meet the necessary criteria.
If so, the appeals will then be considered by the technical appeals committees of both organizations, Buck said.
He added he could not give details on the content of the appeals because of the confidential nature of the process.
“The (Brazilian) appeal was not lodged in the correct procedure — it was not sent to the CEOs of the two organizations — but nonetheless it has been received,” Buck said, adding that it will be treated in the same way as the Brazilian and South African appeals.
In April, 75% of ISO member nations voted to approve OOXML as a standard. 14% voted against the format and the rest abstained.
Microsoft officials have said OOXML’s ISO ratification makes it easier for developers and end users to work with the format and documents created with it. It also makes Microsoft Office products eligible for government procurement initiatives that require open standards.
OOXML competes in the document marketplace with the Open Document Format, which previously won ISO approval. ODF is used in open source office productivity suites such as OpenOffice.org and IBM’s Lotus Symphony package.
Microsoft is facing other troubles on the format front.
At the February ballot-resolution meeting, delegates had just five days to address more than 1,000 complaints about the proposed standard. The changes were voted on without discussion, but since that rushed approval the JTC has delayed publishing the approved spec. Now, a month after the deadline, the final draft is still not published.
Technology lawyer Andy Updegrove, who writes about standards on the Standards Blog, reported that Brazil and South Africa are both objecting to the failure to publish the reconciliation draft. “Despite the fact that this release has been requested by many different parties representing multiple viewpoints, no public or private explanation has thus far been given for the failure to follow rules calling for the release of the draft within 30 days of the close of the BRM,” Updegrove wrote.
Officials at the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) and the Associação Brasileira de Normas Técnicas (ABNT), Brazil’s national standards body, could not immediately be reached for comment.
The CEOs of ISO and IEC each have one month to examine the appeals and to try to reach a compromise with the national standards bodies. If that fails, the appeals are passed to the Standards Management Board at IEC and the Technical Management Board (TMB) at ISO for resolution.
In the wake of its vow last week to add support for ODF to its Office products, the European Commission said it would examine the move with an eye to determining whether it will loosen the software maker’s stranglehold on the desktop applications market.
The EC’s announcement came within hours of Microsoft’s pledge to add ODF support to its Office 2007 desktop applications suite, which uses a version of OOXML as its default file format.
Microsoft said last week that it would add support for ODF, as well as the XML Paper Specification, Adobe’s Portable Document Format (PDF), and China’s Uniform Office Format, to Office 2007 through a service pack slated for release in the first half of 2009.
Microsoft said in April that the vote was a “clear win for the customers, technology providers and governments that want to choose the format that best meets their needs.”
IEC’s Buck expects to have more to say about the appeals process next week, but noted that the situation is unusual.
“This is the first such appeal after a BRM process in ISO/IEC JTC 1, although appeals occur regularly in other technical committees,” he said.