"ISO captured by vendor Microsoft

Brussels, 2 April 2008 — ISO members failed to disapprove the Open XML format. Microsoft has compromised the International Standards Organisation (ISO) during the rush to get a stamp for their Office OpenXML (OOXML), using unfair practices such as committee stuffing in several countries and political interventions of ministers in the standardization process.." ..... "I see an anonymous comment suggest that ISO now stands for: I Sold Out" — Groklaw, What Really Happened at the BRM for OOXML & Who Attended

Details at http://www.noooxml.org

CK Raju

On Wed, Apr 2, 2008 at 10:28 AM, Anivar Aravind anivar@movingrepublic.org wrote:

The long story of how ISO standardisation process fails

Also read India's coments on ISO Ballot Resolution process on venky's Blog http://osindia.blogspot.com/2008/03/indias-comments-on-brm-to-iso.html

-------- Original Message -------- Subject: [bytesforall_readers] OOXML won the vote for ISO standards approval! Date: Tue, 1 Apr 2008 14:13:46 -0400 From: Satish Jha satish.jha@gmail.com Reply-To: bytesforall_readers@yahoogroups.com

While ISO isn't set to announce the official voting tally until tomorrow, the OpenDoc Society http://www.opendocsociety.org/Press-information has posted to a mailing list what it claims are the final results indicating that Microsoft will be granted ISO approval for its Office Open XML (OOXML) document format.

According to the alleged results page, OOXML received a 75 percent "approve" total http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9907583-7.html?tag=nefd.top. It needed 66.66 percent to become an ISO standard. Here is the alleged ISO ballot information on OOXML (zipped PDF file). http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/images/ooxml-vote-pdf.zip

ISO officials aren't commenting on the leaked ballot tally. Nor is Microsoft. ISO officials said on March 31 that they planned to notify privately the national bodies who participated in the standards vote before publicizing the final results on April 2 http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=1301.

*Update*: Microsoft is now confirming (in a rather long-winded way) that OOXML won the vote for ISO standards approval

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2008/apr08/04-01OpenXMLVotePR.mspx. From the company's April 1 press release:

 "While the final vote has not yet been announced formally, publicly
available information shows overwhelming support for Open XML.
According to documents available on the Internet, 86% of all
national body members support ISO/IEC standardization, well above
the 75% requirement for formal acceptance under ISO and IEC rules.
In addition, 75% of the Participating national body members (known
as P-members) support standardization, also well above the required
66.67% requirement for this group.

"Open XML, IS29500, now joins HTML, PDF and ODF as ISO- and
IEC-recognized open document format standards.

"The ratification of Open XML is proof that the consensus-building
process worked."

OOXML is currently an ECMA standard. Microsoft has been advocating for OOXML to receive ISO standard status, as that is seen as more of a "gold" standard by many governments when evaluating standards compliance of new software.

In a note sent to its mailing list recipients, OpenDoc Society Board Member Michiel Leenaars portrayed the alleged OOXML victory as having "minimal"impact on OOXML vs. Open Document Format (ODF) adoption. Leenaars wrote:

"OOXML which was submitted by Microsoft to ECMA, and by ECMA to ISO,
has literally crawled through the needles eye

http://lists.opendocsociety.org/pipermail/members.announce/2008-April/000002.html. After a year of discussion and repairs it still receives the very minimum of support. The BRM convinced some yet unconvinced others, and counter votes from large countries like China, India, Brazil, Canada, South Africa and Iran speak volumes. This must be one of the worst results ever for a standard to pass within ISO/JTC1 in years.

"Appartently (sic) the chair from the Norwegian comitte(e) has filed
a protest against the national outcome. Although one vote would not
make much difference, others may follow."

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