Microsoft promises ODF, OOXML interoperability

Stuart Corner
Sunday, 09 March 2008 13:56

Business IT - Open Source

Microsoft has been pushing hard to have OOXML adopted as an international standard, but has had little success and appears to be creating a deal of ill-feeling among the open source community.

Earlier this month a Ballot Resolution Meeting of the International Standards Organisation (ISO) in Geneva held to vote on acceptance of OOXML as an international standard concluded without coming anywhere close to agreement.

As iTWire reported earlier , "the first vote on whether to make OOXML an ISO standard was held on September 2, 2007 after lengthy specifications had been provided to the industry standards body ECMA by Microsoft. Round one was a pass with 19 'difficulties'- which resulted in a vote on OOXML being fast-tracked to the level of a standard."

After this month's Ballot Resolution Meeting Marino Marcich, managing director of the ODF Alliance, issued a statement saying: "It has again been demonstrated that the standardisation of OOXML in a fast-track process was entirely inappropriate...The BRM's failure to reach a decision reinforced the outcome of the initial ballot that ended on September 2, 2007."

She said that, "Despite the hard work by the many national standards bodies and ISO/IEC, the results fell far short of fixing the most important errors and omissions in OOXML. More than 80 percent of the comments from national bodies were not discussed."

According to ODF, "ECMA and Microsoft chose 'fast track' when the usual and more appropriate ISO approval process was available to them for a specification of this enormity. National bodies attempted to raise these concerns at the BRM and were told they were out of order and regardless there is no other option. In fact, there is no proscribed limit to how long a BRM can take place, and other ISO/IEC standards have taken considerably longer than five days to conduct a BRM.

"Many critical problems identified by national bodies were not discussed or resolved during the BRM...Intellectual property rights issues were left completely out of the BRM process. Resolution of well-founded intellectual property rights concerns are critical to the IT industry and governments and are legitimate issues for national bodies to consider as a group."

Marcich concluded" "The inability to address all the concerns underscores that OOXML should be rejected by national standards bodies. ECMA and Microsoft should seek technical harmonisation with the Open Document Format, already an ISO standard. Alternatively, they can pursue the usual ISO approval procedure instead of the 'fast-track' which is appropriately reserved for mature standards of reasonable scope and size."