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To those who are tuned, the result of the voting process on the
fate of Open Office XML (OOXML)Microsofts last-ditch attempt to be in the
"open" document format raceat the International Organization for
Standardization (ISO) is not exactly surprising. With open source groups
throughout the world campaigning vociferously against the standardwhich, if
standardized, would compete with an already existing ISO standard, ODFmany
governments, especially in emerging countries, were not expected to vote for the
proposal. What is surprising is that as many as 74% of the qualified votes,
actually went in favor of OOXML. If this majority still could not help OOXML
being a standard, that is because it required 75% positive votes and did not
garner enough support from the participating members (Pmembers), a tier of
members whose vote counts more than others (see box on the voting process).
"A ballot on whether to publish the draft standard ISO/IEC
DIS 29500 (the official name of the proposal at ISO), information technologyOffice
Open XML file formatsas an International Standard by ISO and IEC
(International Electrotechnical Commission) has not achieved the required number
of votes for approval," said an official communication from ISO.
The five-month ballot process ended on 2 September and was open
to the IEC and ISO national member bodies from 104 countries, including
forty-one that are participating members of the joint ISO/IEC technical
committee, JTC 1, and information technology.
Approval required two-third of the votes cast by national bodies
participating in ISO/IECs technical committee on Information Technology, JTC
1, to be positive; and no more than one-fourth of them to be negative. According
to ISO, neither of these criteria was achieved. The organization said 53% of the
votes cast by Pmembers were positive and 26% of the total national votes cast
were negative.
According to media reports, seventeen of the Pmembers voted
"Yes" while fifteen of them said "No" and nine abstained.
From among all the members, fifty-one voted "Yes", eighteen voted
"No", and eighteen abstained.
Though ISO has not made public which countries voted
"Yes" and which ones voted "No", some countries had made
their intention public, even before they voted, based on their internal voting
in the national standard bodies.
Among the prominent Pmembers, USA, Germany, Denmark, the
Netherlands, Malaysia, and Switzerland had announced that they would support the
proposal. Most of the emerging countries, such as India, China, and Brazil
(Brazil is not a P member, though) have said they would cast a No vote. So did
Canada, New Zealand, and of course, Venezuela. The prominent P-member countries
that had made their decision to abstain were Australia, Italy, South Korea,
Singapore, and Spain. France was also expected to abstain. Though in the
internal voting in the national standard body of Sweden, OOXML was supported,
the country had apparently decided to abstain.
Indias Rejection
India, which has the most important technology base outside America, had
earlier made its decision to vote "No" to the proposal. The technical
committee set up by BIS rejected Microsofts OOXML, even though Microsoft and
some service providers like Infosys supported it. It was opposed by IBM, IITs,
and a few other bodies while industry bodies like Nasscom and MAIT chose to
abstain.
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The Genesis |
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OOXML (ISO/IEC DIS 29500 in
ISO terminology) is a proposed standard for word-processing documents,
presentations, and spreadsheets that is intended to be implemented by
multiple applications on multiple platforms. According to the submitters,
one of its objectives is to ensure the long-term preservation of documents
created over the last two decades using programs that are becoming
incompatible with continuing advances in the IT field.
ISO/IEC DIS 29500 was
originally developed as the Office Open XML Specification by Microsoft
which submitted it to European Computer Manufacturers Association (ECMA)
for transposing into an ECMA standard. Following a process in which other
IT industry players participated, ECMA International subsequently
published the document as ECMA standard 376.
ECMA International then
submitted the standard in December 2006 to ISO/IEC JTC 1, with whom it has
category A liaison status, for adoption as an International Standard under
the JTC 1 "fast track" procedure. This allows a standard
developed within the IT industry to be presented to JTC 1 as a Draft
International Standard (DIS) that can be adopted after a process
consisting of a one-month review by the national bodies of JTC 1 and then
a five-month ballot open to all voting national bodies of ISO and IEC. |
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Source: ISO |
Indias clarification on the interoperability with the
existing ODF standard was one of the most important issues Microsoft has to
address, according to blogs by champions of open source who oppose OOXML.
More than eighty objections were raised by the committee.
Microsoft counters these objections by claiming that OOXML is an open standard
and its specifications are fully documented. Moreover, there is no royalty
charged and it works on a covenant of not to sue. Also, it does not recourse to
any proprietary information held by Microsoft.
Other objections include OOXML not supporting dates before 1900;
it does not support saving file in HTML format; decodability is not available so
even if the binaries are made available, there is no method to read those
binaries; and lastly there are issues with the spreadsheet format including how
dates are handled in spreadsheet. Page(s) 1 2
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