Oliver Bell’s Weblog

In religion and politics, people’s beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second hand, and without examination.  - Mark Twain

While people have been waiting for the official results from ISO the blogosphere has been buzzing with all sorts of stories about what did and didn’t happen in a few of the countries as they decided upon their final positions for DIS29500.

Two of the countries that seem to have got the most airtime are Germany and Norway, and we’ve seen both of those standards bodies come out with statements over the last 48 hours.

When this process began I remember receiving some very sage advice from one employee of a national body here in the region, she talked to be about how her organization was highly skilled in dealing with extreme conflict as they made very complex decisions.

At the time I remember thinking that she was exaggerating a little, but having witnessed some of the upset expressed by individuals who didn’t get the result that they wanted over the last few days, and the crowds of people willing to take their words as gospel, I now fully understand the advice she was sharing with me.

So, here are links to two of the standards bodies who have posted releases over the last few days explaining their process and the how they reached their final decision.

First of all DIN in Germany, I mentioned their press release in my last post. They begin with;

The reports currently circulating the Internet regarding voting procedures in DIN’s Standards Committee on Information Technology and Selected IT Applications (NIA) on ISO/IEC DIS 29500 “Office Open XML file formats” are false and misleading.

… and they go on to say;

On 11 March 2008 the NIA working committee responsible for technical aspects of ISO/IEC DIS 29500 held a vote to decide whether the “YES with comments” vote of September 2007 should be maintained as a “YES” vote or changed to a “NO” vote, taking the results of the Ballot Resolution Meeting held in February as a basis for their decision. As correctly reported by an unofficial source, the result of the March 11 vote was 14 to 5 in favour of adopting ISO/IEC DIS 29500 as an ISO Standard. Only the external experts who make up the responsible working committee voted on this matter; DIN as such has no vote on technical content in working committees.

NIA’s Steering Committee was NOT called upon to review, and possibly override, the working committee’s technical decision - it does not have the authority to do so. It was, however, involved in a decision as to whether or not the voting procedure at ISO correctly adhered to the formal criteria. Because the Steering Committee’s decision did not relate to any technical issues or the content of the standard itself, but dealt solely with the formalities of the JTC 1 “fast track” procedure, i.e. adherence to procedural rules in the standardization process, DIN felt it was necessary to take a position on this matter. This is the reason the DIN staff member participated in the voting procedure and did not abstain, as is the rule in questions of technical content.

On 27 March 2008 the NIA Steering Committee members who were entitled to vote did NOT vote on approval or non-approval of ISO/IEC DIS 29500 as an International Standard, but SOLELY on the regularity of the voting procedure itself. With a majority of 7 to 6, and 7 abstentions, the Steering Committee deemed the procedure as being in conformity with the rules, and thus had no reason to override the working committee’s “YES” vote. Had the majority of the Steering Committee been convinced that the procedures for developing and voting on ISO/IEC DIS 29500 were in any way irregular, the German vote would have been changed to “ABSTAIN”.

The second, and most recent release comes from Standards Norge in a press release titled “Standard Norges behandling av OOXML for avstemming i ISO“.

Updated 4/4/08, 8am: Stephen McGibbon has a translation, he tells me that he will replace this text if there is an official English version published by Standards Norge - watch his blog for updates.

Stephen has now updated his post with a translation directly from Standards Norge, you will find it here, or directly from Standards Norge here.

The original text that he and I had both posted has been moved to a seperate page here.

As it turns out making decisions around supporting or not supporting a standard is a complex business.

If you’re interested in reading further, Jan van den Beld talks at length in his most recent post about the value of standardization bodies and why they operate the way that they do.

Related posts: Jason Matusow

Reuters is reporting that we’ll have to wait another day before we see the final outcome of the DIS29500 ballot from ISO, the reason given seems pretty rational when you consider the level of the noise in the blogosphere at the moment.

“Because ISO needs first to inform its worldwide membership of national standards bodies of these results, a press release on this subject will be issued on Wednesday, 2 April, 2008,” ISO spokesman Roger Frost said in an e-mail message.

Microsoft have responded with a “holding statement“, given that lots of people are asking and there isn’t really much to say until we see a final result.

“We respect ISO’s desire to first inform its National Body members and all the people who have worked so hard during this process. This has been a remarkable process, involving literally thousands of technical experts, technology consumers, and governments in 87 countries, whose input has helped to improve Ecma’s submitted Open XML standard. Out of respect for the standards process, we will not comment before the final results are known.”

And from DIN, the German national standards body a direct statement addressing allegations that have been thrown at them and their decision making process over the last few days.

The reports currently circulating the Internet regarding voting procedures in DIN’s Standards Committee on Information Technology and Selected IT Applications (NIA) on ISO/IEC DIS 29500 “Office Open XML file formats” are false and misleading.

On the final point, if I have learned one thing over the last year it is that the decision making processes involved in standards creation are complex ones.

While many people seem to believe that they are the final decision maker, when you dig into the process it is only in very few countries where one group or one committee get to make the final and complete decision on what the countries vote will be.

Finally, Patrick Durusau brings a little levity to the moment with his latest post, a non-standard guide to standards behaviour.

The following is a short guide to behaviour in standards committees and standards making in general.

1. Disparage the honesty (intellectual or moral) of others.
2. Disagreement with you is always the result of evil plans and designs.
3. Compromise is just another word for cowardice.
4. Rules should be followed, but only when to your advantage.
5. Chairs, conveners, editors, should be serve only so long as their views agree with yours.
6. People change positions but only by selling out.
7. People who agree with your opponents are clones/whores/lackies.
8. People who agree with you are besieged servants of truth, justice and human rights.
9. Never forget past transgressions, both real and imagined.
10. Remember to always point out the failures of others.

He then goes on to say.

Writing useful standards requires us to move beyond such behaviours.

I have not included examples of those behaviours because that simply starts the cycle all over again. We need to dust ourselves off and resolve to do better in the future and then simply to do so.

There is no profit (if you are of the commercial persuasion) or future (if you are one of the save the world types) or good work (if you are simply trying to write good standards) in pawing over old hurts.

Sound advice.

My colleague Good Hyun in South Korea has posted a story from Korea’s Electronic Times who are reporting that KATS have voted to APPROVE DIS29500.

His english translation of the text of the story reads;

Korean Agency for Technology and Standards (KATS) positioned to be supportive

Korean Agency for Technology and Standards announced its final decision on Microsoft OpenXML “international standard” voting. KATS, who has the representative voting right in Korea, is to vote for OpenXML, on the closing day of voting.

“Our committee agreed to support OOXML from the vote on March 27th. Among 13 committee members 9 agreed and 4 objected. As ECMA accepted and documented most our requirement, that highly affected this decision.” said source from KATS.

This is a fantastic outcome from an extremely well respected standards body here in the Asia Pacific geography.

Here is a link back to Good Hyun’s post.

Several times over the last few months I have been asked why Microsoft has not made a stronger commitment to provide the necessary intellectual property for future versions of the DIS29500 (OpenXML) specification.

Our commitment is a very strong one, and at least as good if not better than most other standards commitments.  That said, we are going to go ahead and further clarify the commitment.

The commitment itself is at the bottom of this post, as a preamble I thought it might be worthwhile to look at other commitments being made in this area from Sun and IBM…

For example the commitment that Sun Microsystems make around patents that are needed to implement ODF reads;

“any implementation of the Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) v1.0 Specification, or of any subsequent version thereof (“OpenDocument Implementation”) in which development Sun participates to the point of incurring an obligation, as defined by the rules of OASIS, to grant (or commit to grant) patent licenses or make equivalent non-assertion covenants.”

This makes a clear and bounded statement around the rights that developers have to the necessary patents and places a dependency upon Sun’s participation in the OASIS ODF technical committee.

IBM takes a slightly different approach in their Interoperability Pledge, they make a very simple statement on the issues of supporting future versions that reads;

“[IBM makes] this irrevocable patent covenant with regard to the Specifications listed below.”

IBM then backs this up in their FAQ;

“IBM will evaluate new versions or additional specifications for inclusion based on their consistency with the objectives of this pledge which is to support widespread adoption of open specifications that enable software interoperability for our customers, and may, from time to time, make additional pledges.”

Microsoft’s commitment in the OSP is comparable to the statement that IBM makes, in that it grants full rights to listed specifications and states that new versions of specification will be considered and added as necessary.

“This promise applies to the identified version of the following specifications [public list posted at http://www.microsoft.com/interop/osp/]. New versions of previously covered specifications will be separately considered for addition to the list.”

For developers wanting to use the ISO/IEC DIS29500 specification this has raised some questions around exactly what level of support Microsoft will pledge to future versions of the OpenXML specification as it continues to evolve through the ISO process.

This is an important issue, and to date I don’t think we have been clear enough around our intent in this area. This has come up in internal discussions several times recently and today a decision was taken to make a public statement to continue to make the intellectual property that developers or users may need available to future versions.

The statement will appear on http://microsoft.com shortly, in the interests of beating content management software to the punch I thought I would also post here. I know it has been an issue of some debate for many folks here in the Asia Pacific region.

The intent and objective that we have here should be clear. We believe that a broad ecosystem of developers supporting OpenXML is good for both the software industry and for customers, and our IPR statements should support that.

“As long as Microsoft participates in the revision process to completion, Microsoft irrevocably commits to apply the OSP to that future version of IS29500.”

Our intent here was to map as closely as possible to the approach Sun had taken (since that was the most common request we heard in our discussions with the community of potential implementers).

Given some differences in the wording of the underlying IPR policies that govern work at ISO and at OASIS, it was clear that we could not simply copy Sun’s language verbatim, so we had to craft some new language to obtain a similar result.

We believe the language we picked aligns very well to the commitment that Sun is making in its pledge relating to ODF in the context of the OASIS policy and rules, and since we know developers are happy with Sun’s statement we believe this additional step that we’re taking for OpenXML is a significant commitment to the growing community of developers and users of the DIS29500 specification.

As I say, it will be up on http://micrsosoft.com somewhere shortly, and I’ll add a link here when it is!

Well, we’re only a few days away from the close of the process to standardize OpenXML with the International Standards Organization.

I have been travelling and meeting with various folks over the last few weeks, not surprisingly every meeting seems to have similar themes. The odd part is watching many unrelated organizations move from one talking point to another, almost in unison.

On the upside, the encouraging part of this current step is that the groups that are apposed to the standardization of OpenXML seem to have run out of technical arguments since the successful ballot resolution meetingin Geneva and now seem to be doing whatever they can to discredit ISO rather than Ecma or Microsoft.

I thought it might be momentarily entertaining to look at some of these themes and just how far off the mark most of them are. This is by no means an extensive list, just a few topics that are top of mind today.

I have to give some people credit for making plausible sounding arguments stick, although at the end of the day the facts will prevail;

Withdraw OpenXML from FastTrack and submit it under a “normal” process. FastTrack is a “normal” process, it was developed by JTC1 to provide a mechanism for standards coming from industry to make their way through the ISO process. At a very high level FastTrack simply starts part way through the conventional ISO process, there is no need to convene a committee to develop a specification from scratch when a Liaison-A organization such as Ecma already has a draft document that is ready to be reviewed.

Jan van den Beld, the former Secretary General of Ecma talks about the process extensively in this PC World article that was published in Australia last week.

It is hard to know what “resubmission under a normal process” actually means, there is nothing for a complete ISO process to develop, the newly formed committee that some groups seem to be pushing for would actually have no little or no work to do…

How can we approve OpenXML when we have not seen the final specification. The final text of the specification is a combination of the draft international standard (DIS) that was published prior to the BRM combined with the resolutions that were passed by the member countries present at that meeting. There can be no last minute edits, surprises or other changes beyond those two documents.

I am told that during the last hour of the last day of the BRM the ITTF stood up and clarified the ISO/IEC position on this issue as it relates to a final draft of the specification, stating that the editor has an obligation to deliver a final version of the document no later than thirty days after ratification of the standard.

It is hard to argue with ISO/IEC on this process, although that doesn’t seem to stop anybody…

I don’t have all the IPR and patent rights to implement OpenXML. The Microsoft Open Specification Promise is pretty clear in that it is a direct grant of rights far all patents needed to work with OpenXML made to every individual on the planet, irrevocably and in perpetuity.

Next time you’re walking along the street just cast your eyes upon a totally random individual and consider that fact that the individual that you’re looking at has a full grant of rights to all patents needed to implement, use or do anything else with OpenXML.

If everybody on the planet has access to the IPR in OpenXML it is hard to work out who doesn’t…

The grant given by the OSP cannot be sublicensed, so some developers are disenfranchised. This is one that has been echoing around the chamber since last August and is somewhat erroneous. The individual who started this one needs a huge round of applause for getting so much mileage out of it.

It is correct that the OSP does not allow sub-licensing of the patents that it grants, so on the face of it this is a convincing piece of FUD. In reality though because the OSP is a direct grant of rights to every individual on the planet there is no need to sublicense.

I don’t need to borrow your bike if somebody already gave me one of my own…

There can only be one document format standard. This one implies that standardization is a little like the movie Highlander, somewhere there is an implied winner and a loser. In reality this has never been the case. Standards frequently feed of other standards, as Patrick Durusau (ODF Editor) recently pointed out.

The argument also dismisses the state of the industry in general, as the CEO of I.R.I.S recently pointed out to Stephen McGibbon, there are already a plethora of document formats serving a range of complex use cases. The I.R.I.S OCR software support 75 of them today, so the question is really around support for a 76th format, not a 2nd format.

This is a technical discussion, not an episode of Highlander…

Chris Capossela is the Senior Vice President at Microsoft who ultimately leads the Microsoft Office business.

His support for the standardization of OpenXML focuses strongly on the benefits that this process brings to our customers and our partners, while at the same time bringing a new level of openness to Microsoft Office in the marketplace in general.

It seems Chris spent part of his St Patrick’s Day publishing an open letter that outlines themes that are on his mind as we come towards the end of the voting process. Including the benefits of OpenXML, what comes from global stewardship of the development of the format, and pledging the companies commitment to the standard as it evolves.

An excerpt from the letter is below;

The benefits of global stewardship
Over the past 14 months the global standards community has been through an amazing process, and the Open XML specification is stronger and better because of it. The 3-step ISO/IEC ratification process is designed to allow the global community the opportunity to review a proposed specification, raise issues about it and work with the submitter to improve it before a final determination is made. It is designed to move national bodies towards consensus approval of the specification. At the close of the second phase on September 2nd, 74 percent of the voting national bodies supported approval of the specification and many national bodies issued comments for resolution in the final phase. What’s truly remarkable is how responsive Ecma’s technical committee was in reviewing and responding to every one of those comments, often working with national bodies to ensure that the responses fully addressed the issue raised. Ecma published drafts of its proposed dispositions over a period of months and issued a complete report on proposed dispositions in mid-January, giving national bodies the ability to thoughtfully consider all of them well in advance of the Ballot Resolution Meeting. Many national bodies indicated that they were satisfied with proposed dispositions before the Ballot Resolution Meeting in late February. At that Meeting, representatives from more than thirty national bodies met for a full week to prioritize and discuss key issues and refine dispositions. The meeting ended with the national bodies deciding to adopt changes to the specification to address the issues that were raised prior to September 2nd. The rigorous input and debate that the Open XML file format has received from national bodies around the world is remarkable, and the final product of their work represents engineering excellence worthy of ISO/IEC approval. If Open XML is approved as an ISO/IEC standard, the story would not end there – like any other standard, maintenance affords the opportunity for continually updating and improving the standard. In this case, the global community would be in control of the evolution of this standard going forward – a fitting result given that this format will be widely used around the world for years to come.

As a result of global feedback and consideration, the Open XML standard under consideration by ISO/IEC has been significantly improved. Microsoft has been afforded a wonderful opportunity as a result of this process. We’ve listened to the global community and learned a lot, and we are committed to supporting the Open XML specification that is approved by ISO/IEC in our products.

A huge amount of information has passed through my inbox since the DIS29500 Ballot Resolution Meeting, most of it constructive and some of it just a predictable last ditch attempt to inappropriately discredit a very successful meeting. 

Originating from the Asia Pacific region, I’m seeing emails being sent to certain countries in Asia that attempt to obfuscate details of the meeting as well as official looking documents being mailed to places as far afield as the Caribbean that try to apply a negative spin to the facts of what happened at the BRM and the progress that has been made with DIS29500, both examples disregard much of the process, the preparation and the consensus that was reached during the time in Geneva.

The communications involved are not from their respective national bodies, they come from individuals I have met over the last year who claim that they don’t have the time that is needed to complete their own national review - on some minor level, if their objections are valid, then it is amusing that they have so much time time to get involved in extra curricular work that extends beyond their home geographies.

Oddly the text of both communications is ambiguous enough to try and insinuate that a representative national view is being put forwards, when it is clearly not. One of the communications goes so far as to express the views of several other nations, facts that the individual concerned could not possibly have any insight into.

I’m sure there is a lot more of the same going on behind the scenes, it is entertaining to watch but ostensibly it is also mostly irrelevant.

At best it is just fun and predictable under-the-covers shenanigans, and the recipent national bodies appear to be recognizing these communications for what they are - cheap shots.

On a more positive front, there is an increasing amount of commentary being published that talks about the progress that was made during the meeting in Geneva, outlining what that means for the overall specification and where it takes us from here.

When all is said and done progress is what the ISO directives encourage, not conflict or procrastination.

Brian Jones has a really good wrap up of some of the progress that was made during the meeting itself, he talks about the bigger topics that were discussed during the five days in Genevaand what all this ultimately means for the improvement of the specification against the national requirements that were expressed there, he also talks about how Ecma prepared for the meeting through their ongoing work with the various national bodies around the world;

For the past two months, Ecma officially held 4 calls per week where national bodies could discuss the comments, and Ecma could explain their proposed resolutions. This meant that by the time we got to the BRM, the countries had time to find which Ecma responses they were not quite satisfied with, and raise those issues at the BRM. The purpose of this entire process is to make improvements to the specification, which in turn may lead countries to change their vote on whether or not they approve the overall spec.

Brian goes on to cover the fact that 98% of Ecma’s proposed dispositions were approved by the BRM, details of new proposals that were put forwards during the meeting and progress on issues such as conformance, OpenXML as a multi-part standard, support for dates, improvements to accessibility (go New Zealand!), clean up of some of the SpreadsheetML functions and work with the ever controversial bitmasks.

Secondly, Rick Jelliffe has a post on his blog that talks about modifications that were made to the DIS29500 specification during the BRM in term of small, medium and large changes, and then goes on to examine the future, not only for OpenXML but also for ODF;

The upshot is that, if DIS29500 mark II and ODF 1.2 both get accepted as standards, by the end of 2008 we should have two standards which together can thoroughly cover the field of representing current and legacy office documents, each representing one of the two dominant commercial traditions, with both under active and significantly open maintenance to fill in the remaining gaps and to repair pending broken parts, with clear cross-mapping to allow interconversion, with an increasing level of modularity so that the can share their component parts, and at least with a feasible agenda of co-evolution and other kinds of convergence.

Maintenance for ISO/IEC DIS29500 (Office Open XML) will ultimately be governed by JTC1’s SC34, and that presents a phenomenal amount of opportunity for anybody who chooses to get involved in that process.

Finally, if I have learned one thing during the last year it is that there is a need to consult recognised experts at every step in the process to understand what is really going on.

As I look around the internet it is very hard to separate those who are just guessing at how the process should be working, or who have a vested interest in the outcome, from those who actually understand how it works. I put myself in one of these categories, so I’m always keen to talk to people who can give me a more rounded view of the world.

One such expert is Jan van den Beld, the former Secretary General of Ecma International. I have been travelling with Jan over the last few days and have had the chance to explore several areas of the ISO and FastTrack processes that previously made little sense to me, his insight into the history and the reasons for why things work they way they do is enlightening to say the least.

For those who are not aware, the current FastTrack directives are dedicated to Mr. van den Beld out of respect for his decades of service to ISO and to standardization in general.

Jan maintains a blog, and has from time to time commented on the process that OpenXML has been going through, most recently he has posted some thoughts on the BRM itself.

I have extracted his words on what consensus at the meeting meant and now to interpret the outcome, but I would encourage you to read his whole post. (and anything else he posts in the future!)

Alex Brown, the BRM Convener, indicated that the Edited Notes of the Meeting and the Resolutions of the Meeting are publicly available. The voting results as well. By reading those documents and discussing with many people who were present, it is now clear that:

· Consensus prevailed on the process, as shown in the ISO press release http://www.iso.org/iso/pressrelease.htm?refid=Ref1117 (“The BRM was not intended to be a public event but followed the orderly and inclusive process of ISO and IEC”)

· Consensus prevailed on the vote itself: the voting procedures were discussed in length for almost half a day during the BRM on Wednesday and the Resolutions of the Meeting show that the voting procedures were adopted by wide consensus (29 in favor; none against; two abstentions)

· Consensus prevailed during the technical discussions as a look at the Resolutions of the Meeting shows that a very important set of technical work was achieved and adopted by wide consensus during the BRM itself (see list of technical work below)

· Consensus prevailed on adopting 98.7% of the responses (828 + 186 responses (out of 1027)), leaving only 13 responses to be solved during the maintenance phase.

· Consensus is prevailing on the result of the BRM. Many countries are reporting that the BRM provided a positive outcome. For examples the HoD of the US writes in his official report that the “BRM was Successful — Compromises were reached which are acceptable to the U.S.” and the US V1 technical committee votes to recommend Approval of DIS 29500.

Many balanced statements are now published on the BRM for example from Norway, New Zealand, Denmark and the ODF Editor himself http://blogs.msdn.com/jasonmatusow/archive/2008/03/05/some-balanced-statements-regarding-the-open-xml-brm.aspx!

Whatever the outcome of all of this work it is clear that the OpenXML specification has seen significant improvement over the last 18 months, most of it deriving from the inclusion of thousands of individuals from the 87 voting countries that are represented in this process.

The end of last week saw Patrick Durusau has posted another open letter on his site, again urging supporters of ODF to support the standardization of OpenXML within ISO.

His letter is titled “Genies, Peasants and NOOOXML“. As in some of his previous letters he is taking a long term view on the benefits that the ratification of OpenXML would bring to the community as a whole.

One evening, through a cold miserable rain, a hungry Russian peasant was walking home. A luminous being appeared in their path. “Please! If you will make one wish, it will free me from my prison!” The genie pointed to an oddly shaped lamp on the side of the path. “Wish for anything you want, food, power, wealth, …, anything!” The peasant grunted, “I wish my neighbor’s cow would die,” as he pushed
past the genie to continue home.

The strategy behind NOOXML strikes me as being quite similar to that of the Russian peasant. It seeks nothing that would benefit itself, no new product to sell to customers, no new service to serve as a revenue stream. It is simply a wish that “…my neighbors cow would die.”

On a similar note, I notice from Doug Mahugh’s blog that the US V1 committee has met to discuss its position on the DIS29500 vote that will be cast by the United States.

Their recommendation continues to be to APPROVE the ratification of OpenXML, despite the personal comments made by their head of delegation as the BRM came to a close in Geneva.

This isn’t the final position for the United States, but it is a positive step. Doug explains in his post;

The final outcome: we are recommending that the US maintain its Approve position on DIS 29500. The next step will be for the INCITS Executive Board to conduct a letter ballot to approve this result.

Finally Brian Jones has posted more information about the work that took place at the BRM in Geneva, outlining some of the more complex issues that were discussed and how they were resolved during the meeting;

It was really a crazy week, and I know that a lot of people went without sleep as we worked around the clock to make the most of the opportunity. It was a chance for everyone to discuss additional things they wanted to see done with the spec, and also to meet those folks who will probably be involved in the next version of the spec as it enters into maintenance (assuming it is approved this month).

You might remember some time ago Intergen released a test project to CodePlex that converted IIS logs to SpreadsheetML.

This week at MIX’08 in the United States they have done it again, this time releasing a Silverlight 2.0 based OpenXML WordprocessingML viewer.

The work has been done by a small team over the last couple of months, with James Newton-King leading the development work, James talks a little on his blog about what it has taken to build this.

The work is making the headlines both in the New Zealand press, and overseas.

Here is an extract from New Zealand’s Computerworld;

Kiwi software developer Intergen is launching software it claims is a world first at the MIX08 conference in Las Vegas this week.

The company’s TextGlow product allows users to view Word documents created in Microsoft’s controversial Office Open XML format without having to download them and without having Microsoft Office or Word installed on their computers.

[...cut...]

As one of the first applications to combine Office Open XML and Silverlight, TextGlow is a technological breakthrough. It works cross platform and is freely available to all users.

This is a really good example of a small team making use of the OpenXML specification to build a really cool tool!

You can take a look for yourself here.

It is almost 2am in Singapore, I’m tired, a little jet-lagged and desperately in need of sleep. Of course my week in Europe last week is still lingering and I’m wide awake at the worst possible time.

Trying to find something interesting to do I have been reading various blogs. Stephen McGibbon has a post that I thought would be worth sharing, he is pointing to a further text by Patrick Durusau.

Patrick is the the editor of the ISO/IEC 26300 (ODF) and the OASIS 1.2 (ODF) specification, and is now recommending approval of DIS 29500 as an ISO standard.

Patrick’s article “On being heard” explains this change in his position:-

On The Importance Of Being Heard
As a non-attendee to the BRM on DIS 29500, I have been trying to sort out fact from fiction in the highly imaginative accounts of the meeting. I have been able to isolate only one common point of agreement in all the published and unpublished reports that I have seen.

That point of agreement is that everyone at the table was heard. That may not seem like a lot to an Oracle or IBM, but name the last time Microsoft was listening to everyone in a public and international forum? At a table where a standard for a future product was being debated by non-Microsoft groups?

So, now that Microsoft is listening (something we should encourage), in an international and public forum, what are our options?

• Reject DIS 29500? The cost of rejection is that ordinary users, governments, smaller interests, all lose a seat at the table where the next version of the Office standard is being written.
• Approve an admittedly rough DIS 29500? That gives all of us a seat at the table for the next Office standard. Granting that I wince at parts of DIS 29500, it is hard for me to argue with that rationale.

Because approval of DIS 29500 insures an effective international and public forum whose members will be heard by Microsoft I recommend approval of DIS 29500 as an ISO standard.*

5 March 2008

Patrick Durusau

*This is a change in my prior position on DIS 29500. Different behavior has led to a different DIS 29500 and hence a different position on my part.

This is both a significant change in position for Patrick, and also a testament to how far we have come over the last year.

Regardless of where the process to standardize OpenXML ends it can’t be denied that these are exciting times for Microsoft, for our customers and for all the folks I work with…