The standards debate over the preferred international document format has been ongoing for months now. The International Organisation for Standardization (ISO) has officially put on hold the certification of Microsoft’s Office Open XML (OOXML), after registering appeals from India, Brazil, South Africa and Venezuela, received some days ago against the March 2008 ratification. (Read the official press release here)There were initial reports suggesting that at least ten out of the 32-member core group countries of the ISO had objected to the OOXML standard, including China, Iran and Canada. But only four official appeals have been registered. Non-government representatives from Denmark and Norway had also lodged appeals, but these were disregarded as not coming from official sources.
At present, the appeals are being considered by the heads of the ISO and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC), which will then be submitted to the respective management boards by the end of this month, according to Reuters.
According to the appeals procedure, the boards will decide whether the appeal should proceed or not. If they agree to proceed, the chairpersons of the boards will form a conciliation panel to hear the appeal and try to mediate at the earliest. If that too fails, the panel will revert to the heads of the ISO and the IEC with recommendations on further action.
The appeal is primarily against the voting process, which was allegedly fast-tracked and rushed through to the dissatisfaction of many parties.
The first round of voting at the ISO rejected the draft OOXML proposal, but later inconsistencies led to a final ratification. States have appealed on the following grounds: flawed voting procedure; insufficient time (only five days) to study the proposed standard; some changes voted upon without discussion; and the final draft being still unavailable to ISO member states, despite a one-month-after-ratification publication rule.
However, there are other unofficial grievances floating around. With an ISO certification, Microsoft would have a clear stronghold in the public sector, where information storage is the key to sustaining the institutional cycle. But some countries may be reluctant to approve proprietary formats like the OOXML. Instead, they have demonstrated a preference for open-source formats like the Open Document Format (ODF), which already exists as an ISO standard. Some governments fear that if OOXML is accepted, it will make older government records unreadable and inaccessible.
Simultaneous with all of this, the European Commission has begun (another!) anti-trust investigation against Microsoft, this time over the alleged misconduct in the OOXML standardization process.
Microsoft, on its part, has made efforts to ensure that its software is compatible with ODF. A spokesperson highlighted concerns of backwards compatibility, while announcing that its latest patch for Office 2007 would have support for ODF, instead of its own OOXML format. This announcement was made before the appeals were formally registered before the ISO, and I have been unable to find an official statement in response to present developments (would be great if someone could provide a link in this regard).
India’s position:
Things came to a head recently in India, when the IT giant accused certain members of the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) – notably the Indian Institute of Technology Powai/Bombay and the National Informatics Centre – of an ODF bias. IIT-B, via an open letter from Dr Deepak B Phatak, expressed protest over Microsoft’s continued “representations to the top Indian leadership (read Ministry of Consumer Affairs), pressuring them to change the Indian vote”, Business Standard reports.
There is some contention over which entities in India support which format, but international members of the ODF alliance include IBM, Sun Microsystems, Red Hat (Linux), Oracle, and Google. According to BS, it also has Indian sanction from the Department of Information Technology (DIT), National Informatics Centre (NIC), C-DAC, IIT-B and IIM-Ahmedabad. Already, some state governments (e.g., Delhi, Kerala) have invested in ODF, fuelling the regulatory divide.
While I have not managed to lay hands on the text of India’s appeal, Phatak’s open letter available on his blog here, throws some light on the Indian position: (For those who manage to wade through the letter, read the comments – they are fun…)
He establishes two basic concerns of standard-setting in this context: openness (i.e., it is accessible to any independent user without depending on proprietary material), and interoperability (i.e., this standard must be compatible with any existing standard – in this case, ODF). In contrast, OOXML is a proprietary format, unlike the ODF, and has its own technical issues. Phatak also raised concerns about backward compatibility (i.e., all pre-existing documents should be covered by this format), and the future development of the format. (I am no techie, and don’t want to get into details here, but will be glad to discuss these issues either in the comments section or via email.)
As an aside, read also this classic Brazillian take on Microsoft’s response in the south American country.
The workings of the ISO may be suspect, the lobbying tactics of Microsoft may be disliked, but right now, things are on hold. ODF is still the standard, teetering on the edge maybe, but still on the right side of the crevice. As is my wont, I have my usual endnote: another task for the ISO. It may not be as daunting as the ODF-OOXML case, but is of immediate concern to peripatetics like me – please work on the plugs!
(Image from: http://blogs.zdnet.com/open-source/images/ooxml-iso.jpg)
