FFII opposes Fasttrack adoption of MS OOXML as ISO standard

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FFII opposes Fasttrack adoption of MS OOXML as ISO standard

frankie

Mon Jan 29 23:12:38 -0800 2007

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The Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII) has sent an open letter to all delegations of the International Standardization Organization (ISO) to oppose with contradictions the "fast track" adoption of Microsoft's 6000-page OOXML specification (ECMA-376) before the deadline of February, 5th.

Accordning to the FFFI, "OpenXML relies on undisclosed patents, and undisclosed or incomplete licensing terms that make any independent reimplementation impossible or heavily risky. It obliges implementors to reverse-engineer the behavior of old closed Microsoft applications and formats. It uses non-standard formats for languages and dates, and specifies known bugs.

"OOXML was produced in one year by Microsoft alone and ratified as ECMA-376 by ECMA, a private association that drafts standards on demand. By comparison, the Open Document Format ISO standard took five years of work through and counts with multiple implementation.

"It is simply impossible to clarify all the issues and contradictions existing in ECMA-376 within such a short fast-track time frame. Indeed, this standards-stuffing attempt undermines the entire credibility of the ISO/IEC process."

6000 pages and not very open

lars

Tue Jan 30 23:04:52 -0800 2007
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Licensing problems abound in the spec.

However, just focusing on the technical parts one can see that it's not at all open, especially in the area MS members like to make the most noise about: "compatibility" with old MS formats. The old binary files seem to simply be encapsulated in the XML, which does absolutely nothing for interoperability and still does not fulfill court orders for providing documentation for the old binary formats.

So you still have the same old problem, an undocumented binary file, with an XML wrapper. In this case the wrapper simply adds further licensing problems to what was once a technical problem.