Ref. Ares(2011)808658 - 25/07/2011

Inter-Institutional Committee for Informatics

Conclusions on document exchange
formats following the discussion on office
automation platforms

The mandate of the Inter-Institutional Committee for Informatics (hereafter “CII”)
includes, on the one hand, the exchange of information about the IT policies of the
Institutions represented in it (hereafter “the Institutions”) and, on the other hand, the
identification and encouragement of potential areas of synergy.
In this context, during its meeting held in Brussels on 14 December 2010, the CII held a
discussion about the current situation of, and the future strategies for, the office
automation platforms used by the Institutions, based on a survey distributed ahead of the
meeting and filled in by all the Institutions as well as by 15 additional EU Agencies
(hereafter “the survey”).
In addition, in order to initiate and facilitate the discussion, the Commission delivered a
presentation of its project “Next Office Automation Platform” (NOAP).
The main findings of the survey were the following:

(1) At present, the EU institutions typically run Microsoft-based solutions on the
corporate desktop, as their office productivity suite, on the e-mail platform side,
and on the collaborative platform, although diversity is certainly higher in the
latter.

(2) All respondents indicated their expectation to remain on Microsoft-based
platforms in the office automation realms mentioned above for the foreseeable
future (i.e. for the 2 years to come).

(3) The revisable document formats used at present are mostly Office 2002/2003
formats (84% of replies). The expected prevailing document format for the future
is Office Open XML (68% of replies).

(4) The Internet browser offering is already diversified at present, with a strong OSS
presence (Firefox) alongside Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser, and this
offering will become increasingly diversified in the years to come.

The discussion showed the following:
– A decision is due on what how revisable document exchange format should evolve in
the future. Indeed, Microsoft Office 2003 with Office 97 compatibility, the format
currently used for inter-institutional exchanges, as well as the most widely used
internally in the Institutions, is outdated.
– Standards have since been adopted by standardisation bodies in this area, as well as in
the area of non-revisable document formats.

– Irrespective of the migration intentions of each of the Institutions, there is now a high
expectation both internally and externally that document exchange formats should be
based on standards.
Following the discussion held during the meeting, the Institutions agreed that a common
approach to revisable and non-revisable document exchange formats was advisable.
This common approach can be summarised as follows.

1.
Exchanges with the external world.

1.1.
As a general rule, non-revisable document formats should be preferred. In
this area there are two standards, both of which are implemented by a large
variety of viewing tools, including Open Source Software (OSS). The PDF
(ISO/IEC 32000-1:2008) is a widely used official standard. However, for
archiving purposes, the second standard PDF/A (ISO 19005-X) offers some
advantages. It is recommended to use at least one of the two ISO standards
for non-revisable document formats.

1.2.
In cases where documents have to be exchanged using revisable document
formats, the principle to be applied by analogy is the same as when dealing
with multilingualism. Citizens and the Institutions’ partners (e.g. Member
States) should be put at the centre, and the Institutions should take all
appropriate measures to be able to provide them with documents in the
standard format of their choice.
The minimum requirement is to support XML-based revisable document
formats standardised by the International Organization for Standardization,
namely:
– Open Document Format for Office Applications, or ODF (ISO/IEC
26300:2006).
– Office Open XML, or OOXML (ISO/IEC 29500:2008).
In addition, the Institutions are encouraged to support, on a best effort basis,
other widely used document formats.
Whenever multiple formats are supported, equal quality may not be
guaranteed.

2.
Interinstitutional exchanges.
2.1.

As far as non-revisable document formats are concerned, there is no
reason to depart from the format recommended for exchanges with the
external world. Therefore it is recommended to use at least one of the two
ISO standards (ISO/IEC 32000-1:2008 or ISO 19005-X).

2.2.
As far as revisable document formats are concerned, XML-based
international standards are the preferred approach. Given the fact that:

2
– on the one hand, OOXML is much more widely used than ODF at the
moment, and this situation is not likely to evolve in the foreseeable
future; and
– on the other hand, all the Institutions plan to migrate to office automation
platforms which will produce XML files natively while providing 100%
native support for legacy formats such as Office 2003,
the preferred document exchange among the Institutions is OOXML.
2.3.

The guidelines given above should not become an impediment for achieving
even greater administrative efficiency through interinstitutional cooperation. In particular:
– where, for legal or other purposes, a non-revisable document must be
regarded as the official version, the Institutions should, where necessary,
exchange also its revisable version;
– where, for technical reasons, an Institution needs a revisable document in
its native format, the originating Institution should provide it in that
format, in addition to the official exchange format (if different);
– where, for legal or other reasons, a closed group of users is established,
specific arrangements can be made.

The Institutions agreed to take the appropriate measures so that, at the end of their
ongoing or future migration projects, they can implement this common approach in an
efficient and fully synchronised manner.

Brazilian Open XML debate veteran Homembit comprehends (es) the fraternisation:

A few days ago we were all surprised by a document leaked at CableGate, exchanged between the US embassy in Brazil and the American Government in 2007. According to this cable, Microsoft made serious accusations against the Brazilian government, and…, they indirectly asked for an intervention of the American Government to halt the spread of ODF in Brazil, to win the Brazilian support for the approval of OpenXML in ISO, to halt the partnership between the Brazilian technical committee and other committees discussing the international standard at that time, to reduce the influence of Brazil in the international debate on OpenXML, and also to accuse the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Brazilian Presidency’s Civil House of being anti-Americans.

Jan Wildeboer of Redhat comments:

We all knew that MSFT would fight hard against ODF. But calling it an un-american standard? Geez.

I don't know if the Brazilian government was pro-American or not. What felt offensive to me was the attempt to depict technical criticism of the format as a way to "discredit" it. Actually that is quite a distortion of the facts. The format was formally not ready for adoption and technical defects were brushed away by stuffing committees. The diplomats also had their difficulties to understand the difference between adoption of a data exchange format and procuring a software solution. Other foreign offices, among them Brazil and Germany, had better recommendations than a hapless co-existence idea.

US citizens and corporations would figure out why the US embassy was turned into a solutions provider abroad. The amount of cooperation between sales representatives and diplomacy is surprising and does not suit the dignity of their office. Disgusting.

Please read Homembit's article for a Brazilian SSO inside perspective.

Source: http://it.slashdot.org/story/11/01/19/0059209/Australia-Mandates-Microsofts-Office-Open-XML

See the FFII press release: European Parliament wants Open Document exchange format for electronic business for further details.

You can subscribe to FFII news to receive them per mail.

Throughout the controversial phases the editing process demonstrated a clear bias of professional editors towards a certain corporate agenda and pushed the Open XML article towards a "shadow article" as a target, close to advertisement. So regardless what was changed by the 'ordinary guys' would be reversed, step by step.

Now the Open XML controversy is gone. We have to understand that a lot of money is at stake. Consider that the Council could save 50 Million Pounds by shifting to ODF and open source. And that is just a tiny example.

Microsoft subject matter experts from both the support organization and the product team will be onsite to answer questions about the Binary File Formats. This Plugfest will be a great opportunity for you to test your [Binary File Format]BFF implementations and receive immediate feedback and assistance from Microsoft.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dmahugh/archive/2010/08/18/binary-file-format-plugfest.aspx

Source: http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=id&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.detikinet.com%2Fread%2F2010%2F07%2F28%2F151112%2F1408538%2F398%2Fdokumen-negara-wajib-gunakan-format-odf%2F%3Fi991103105

I doubt reform is possible.

Others might have a different opinion:

Thomas Vinje, the lawyer of ECIS, raised the issue at the recent OpenForumEurope (OFE) Summit (the one where Neelie Kroes praised "open" standards) of compatibility of the OOXML ISO specification with the procurement directive, which forbids product naming and platform dependencies. This is indeed an interesting question that needs to be investigated. Does OOXML still has platform dependencies? If yes, what would happen if the specification is required in a public tender?

Bryden was also a member of the Commission's EXPRESS "expert panel" group on the future of European Standardisation which report advises for strong IPR policies against open standardization. The IMCO meeting relates to the Parliament phase of the EXPRESS process and the Future of European Standardisation. Read what the winding lobby snakes write in their report to actually promote standards locked down by software patents:

European standards are developed in an open process, and there are uniform, nondiscriminatory conditions for their development as well as for their sale or distribution. The implications of IPRs relevant to a standard need to be visible to the standards developers during the standardization process. Cooperation should further be improved between the standards bodies and the European Patent Office to ensure that issues where there is an interaction are visible at an early stage, as this would lead to an improved quality of patents and standards. In this context, ETSI has established cooperation with the European Patent Office and recently signed an MoU, thus institutionally confirming their commitment to deepen their established cooperation.
It is important that standards organizations continue to ensure innovation-friendly policies including a balance between the interests of the users of standards and the rights of owners of intellectual property as almost all standards bodies do today.
Such a balance may take into account differences regarding the areas of standardisation, according to the consensus of the stakeholders involved. … Such a balance needs to also consider the requirement to continue incentives to innovate in technical areas subject to standardization.
Standards bodies are encouraged to assess their IPR policies with a focus on promoting innovation.
In the Guidelines for cooperation between the EC, EFTA and the ESOs, the ESOs have committed to ensure that standards can be used by the market operators. The objective is to ensure licences for any essential IPRs contained in standards are provided on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory conditions (FRAND). In practice, in the large majority of cases, patented technology has been successfully integrated into standards under this approach. On this basis, standards bodies are encouraged to strive for improvements to the FRAND system taking into consideration issues that occur over time.

The Consumer Committee manages to hold a hearing with the opponents of consumer-friendly ict standards policy. Despite some placeholder organisations no real consumer groups and no sme representatives are involved.

Links

• Members of IMCO
• Poster of the IMCO Hearing
• Programme of the hearing

In its pre-release form Office™ 2010 supports not the approved Strict variant of OOXML, but the very format the global community rejected in September 2007, and subsequently marked as not for use in new documents – the Transitional variant.

[Their] representatives will argue (with some justification) that terms like “legacy”, “deprecated”, and “new document” are tricky to define, but then this argument extends to the bizarre assertion that the Strict variant need never be supported. I believe, however, countries expect a more reasonable, plain-dealing approach to their clearly expressed intent – not this kind of wheedling sophistry. Mr Capossela writes that Microsoft has “learned a lot”; but on the evidence before us now, this was wishful thinking.

"Danish expert and BRM delegate Jesper Lund Stocholm, running an analysis of Office 2010 files wrote: “It has been the fear of many that Microsoft will never, ever care at all about the strict conformance clause of ISO/IEC 29500, and my tests clearly [are] a sign that they were right.”"

"Most worrying of all, it appears than Ecma have ceased any proactive attempt to improve the text, leaving just a handful of national experts wrestling with this activity. It seems to me that Microsoft/Ecma believe 95% of the work has been done to ensure the standard is “useful and relevant”. Looking at the text, I reckon it is more like 95% that remains to be done, as it is still lousy with defects."

"One of the worst things that happened out of that, [is that the ISO] which was previously respected by people that didn't know it so well, became absolutely despised," he said. "There are some countries now thinking of pulling out [of ISO] because it is simply not worth participating in a process that is so obviously corrupted."

(17) Office Open XML. The “.docx, .xlsx and .pptx” file formats used in the Office 2007 version of Microsoft’s Primary PC Productivity Applications shall implement the ECMA 376 Specification. This commitment shall apply to successor versions of Microsoft’s Primary PC Productivity Applications with respect to IS 29500. This means that Microsoft shall support the relevant standard and provide a warranty as specified in the general provisions in Section B.I of this Undertaking, effective 1 January 2010.

(18) Microsoft shall publicly document Additional Information for the ECMA 376 Specification that meets the requirements of paragraph (15) above. This commitment shall apply to successor versions of Microsoft’s Primary PC Productivity Applications with respect to IS 29500. Microsoft shall provide a warranty as specified in the general provisions in Section B.I of this Undertaking, effective 1 January 2010.

So Paragraph 15 seems interesting:

(15) This paragraph describes how Microsoft shall implement paragraphs (16) to (18) and Section 2.2. Microsoft shall make Interoperability Information available to interested undertakings relative to file formats used by Microsoft Office Word, PowerPoint and Excel that allows third-party Software Products to open, manipulate, save, exchange and share documents created by Microsoft’s PC Productivity Applications without a loss of container structure information or any instructions in the file that describe the document's formatting characteristics. For these purposes, file formats are understood as containers to hold data created by users of those Microsoft’s PC Productivity Applications and information describing associated properties of that data, and the Interoperability Information in the foregoing sentence does not include information about the functionality of these applications or the underlying operating systems that could be used to clone or port Microsoft products in whole or in part.

Now the patent pledge for open source… developers!

Patent Pledge for Open Source Developers

Microsoft irrevocably promises not to assert any Microsoft Necessary Claims against you as an open source software developer ("You") for making, using, importing, or distributing any implementation of the Technical Documentation ("Covered Implementation"), subject to the following. This is a personal promise directly from Microsoft to You, and You acknowledge it is a condition of benefiting from it that no Microsoft rights are received from suppliers, distributors, or otherwise by any other person in connection with this promise. To benefit from this promise, you must be a natural or legal person participating in the creation of software code for an open source project. An "open source project" is a software development project the resulting source code of which is freely distributed, modified, or copied pursuant to an open source license and is not commercially distributed by its participants. If You engage in the commercial distribution or importation of software derived from an open source project or if You make or use such software outside the scope of creating such software code, You do not benefit from this promise for such distribution or for these other activities.
To clarify, "Microsoft Necessary Claims" are those claims of Microsoft-owned or Microsoft-controlled patents that are necessary to implement the Technical Documentation. … Where a software development project has in all other respects the characteristics of an open source project, distribution among the participants of that project of source code developed by natural persons under an employment contract or by natural or legal persons under a contract to develop is not considered to be commercial distribution, and that software development project does not lose its character as an open source project merely because such distribution takes place among participants. Software is deemed to be commercially distributed within the meaning of this promise when the distributor derives revenues in connection with the distribution, such as from subscriptions, updates, or user-based connection fees or from services that are contractually required for a customer to obtain the current version and/or updates of the software product in question.
This promise is not an assurance either (i) that any of the Microsoft-issued patent claims cover a Covered Implementation or are enforceable or (ii) that a Covered Implementation would not infringe on patents or other intellectual property rights of any third party. No other rights except those expressly stated in this promise shall be deemed granted, waived, or received by implication, exhaustion, estoppel, or otherwise.

I wonder how much fun Brad Smith and his colleagues had with this…

Unlike the standards development systems of many other countries, the U.S. system systematically considers the views of all interested parties in a balanced way, leading to some of the most robust standards in the world. And the openness of our national standards system to new participants means that their needs can be met quickly and through innovative, collaborative solutions.

Question 3 With the globalization of technology development and business, is it time to assess an international standards system developed 50 years ago?
ANSI believes that the current international standards system is working well. It would be helpful to have an opportunity to better understand any concerns that you may have about the system so that we may work to address them. A meeting request letter has been sent under separate cover so that we may pursue this discussion.

As a founding member of ISO and a participant in the IEC for over a century, the U.S. enjoys a position of significant leadership within these organizations. Americans have served and continue to serve as officers and as influential members of all ISO and IEC governance bodies. We work very hard to garner broad support for the suggested improvements we put forward, and have developed strong relationships with many of our global partners within the international standardization community. As a result, we have been very successful in suggesting increased coordination and multiple process changes to the global system that benefit U.S. stakeholders.

And when U.S. constituents were concerned about new ISO and IEC standards that could been seen to usurp governmental authority, ANSI led the development of a set of principles to ensure that ISO and IEC standards provide solid tools to support the implementation – not set the direction – of public policies.

On the "Fii destept" ("Be Smart") website http://www.fii-destept.ro , we have some arguments for legally buying Windows 7 preinstalled on new computers:

"Would you buy a bike without chain or brakes ? Then why would you buy a PC without Windows legally preinstalled ?" says the announcement. "P.S. If you've answered YES at the first question, then it must be something wrong with you".

"If you trust your neighbour, Gigi, to install an operating system on your new computer, well… Our advice is to purchase an original Windows 7 license and don't rely on Gigi".

Other campaign sites are http://ftw.ro/ („volunteer” bloggers on the same subject), http://www.schimbafontul.ro , http://scoaladeeficienta.ro/

The general impression is that Microsoft is targeting the less IT-educated audience in Eastern countries, to counterbalance market share loses in other parts of the world.

How do you comment on that ?

I spent 22 years as the chairman of what is now ISO/IEC JTC1/SC34. SC34 is the committee that standardized SGML in the 1980s and now is responsible for both ODF, supported by many open-source products, and OOXML, the XML released by Microsoft in response to ODF. Neither ODF nor OOXML has anything to do with ODA/ODIF, which have been dormant since the turn of the current century but were still under development in the 1990s in a committee that was parallel to the one that became SC34.

Our past analysis: OOXML is a response. Thank you very much for the confirmation. Stronger language from Mason found in this article.

A Texas judge ruled Tuesday that Microsoft cannot sell one of its flagship products, Word, in the United States because of patent infringement. …Judge Leonard Davis.. ordered a permanent injunction that "prohibits Microsoft from selling or importing to the United States any Microsoft Word products that have the capability of opening .XML, .DOCX or DOCM files (XML files) containing custom XML," according to an announcement by the plaintiff, Toronto-based i4i Inc.

i4i? Ah, the world famous inventor of the "Method and system for manipulating the architecture and the content of a document separately from each other" which is so basic to our digital societies?

PERMANENT INJUNCTION
In accordance with the Court’s contemporaneously issued memorandum opinion and order
in this case, Microsoft Corporation is hereby permanently enjoined from performing the following
actions with Microsoft Word 2003, Microsoft Word 2007, and Microsoft Word products not more
than colorably different from Microsoft Word 2003 or Microsoft Word 2007 (collectively “Infringing
and Future Word Products”) during the term of U.S. Patent No. 5,787,449:
1. selling, offering to sell, and/or importing in or into the United States any
Infringing and Future Word Products that have the capability of opening a .XML,
.DOCX, or .DOCM file (“an XML file”) containing custom XML;
2. using any Infringing and Future Word Products to open an XML file
containing custom XML;
3. instructing or encouraging anyone to use any Infringing and Future Word
Products to open an XML file containing custom XML;
4. providing support or assistance to anyone that describes how to use any
infringing and Future Word Products to open an XML file containing custom XML;
and
5. testing, demonstrating, or marketing the ability of the Infringing and Future
Word Products to open an XML file containing custom XML.
This injunction does not apply to any of the above actions wherein the Infringing and Future
Word Products open an XML file as plain text.
This injunction also does not apply to any of the above actions wherein any of the Infringing
and Future Word Products, upon opening an XML file, applies a custom tranform that removes all
custom XML elements.
This injunction further does not apply to Microsoft providing support or assistance to anyone
that describes how to use any of the infringing products to open an XML file containing custom
XML if that product was licensed or sold before the date this injunction takes effect.
This injunction becomes effective 60 days from the date of this order.
__________
LEONARD DAVIS
UNITED STATES DISTRICT JUDGE
So ORDERED and SIGNED this 11th day of August, 2009.

Patent problems

We may add that while Microsoft always pays lip service to patent reform and patent quality, it effectively obstructed even moderate steps of pragmatic reform in the field of software patenting with massive lobbying investment and an ideological agenda. An ideological motivation you don't find among all the other players which have a real business. The massive lobbying also applies to colonial attitudes towards patent regimes of third nations in which the American company operates, or the European Union, our main area of operations as the FFII e.V. Ironically Microsoft itself is a favourite target of troll challenges and no one knows how much profits Marshall Phelps actually generates by selling their Microsoft FAT patents. In the spectacular case of TomTom we were told it was a very small amount. Some American critics as Brian Kahin speak of a patent bubble of low value patents but how is it going to burst? When you have a licensing business a good patent is one that hurts. Maybe the Encyclopedia Brittannica is an example, it failed commercially and now became an (unsuccesful) patent enforcement agency against actual market players.

In the recent referral G03/08 about software patentability an European Patent Office case named T 424/03 (Microsoft) was center to the debate. Find the Amicus letters here. Currently you also have a pending referral on Bilski in the US Supreme Court which is more far reaching than software. In the US many examination tests were dismantled such as the machine or transformation box test which opened the flood gates and unbalanced the system. It was reintroduced under the Bilski ruling but appealed at the supreme court. The Bilski test does not rule out software or business method patents but provides means to reduce the pressure within the examination system in later stages.

First you wreck the law, then the trolls wreck you.

Software Patents are a pain for market players of all sizes. In Europe some people from the FFII Community run a new Petition and we also prepare an international effort. The FFII, a charity under German law financed by membership fees and donations, has a lot of expertise and proposals on how to overcome the current troll problems and improve the examination and litigation system. Unfortunately learning the hard way does not guarantee a quick learning process.

What does it mean to Open XML?

Right now ISO/IEC 29500 ("OOXML") is patent encumbered and cannot be called an "open standard" according to conventional definitions and looks unusable for the public sector. Microsoft's own patents and lack of licensing clarity were a real concern, but i4i's enforcement efforts are on another level. ISO Open XML is currently in a critical situation as you can expect more enforcement attempts of i4i to follow in order to sqeeze money out of the market, in particular once Microsoft is forced to pay. On the other hand Microsoft will be forced to use all legal means to get rid of the patent. We need to keep a close eye on the upcoming developments but i4i may not prevail.

Expect the FFII, Eurolinux and many others to fight for that.

• European Petition: Stopsoftwarepatents.eu
• FFII Website FFII e.V. and FFII website for "Groff" text processing tools

The recommendation from Microsoft is that users roll back to an earlier version. So here is the official workaround for Office users:

• Remove Office manually, reinstall Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac from the original installation media, and then upgrade to Office 2008 for Mac 12.1.9 Update. Do not upgrade to Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac Service Pack 2 (12.2.0) from Microsoft AutoUpdate.
• Use Time Machine to roll back to Office 2008 for Mac 12.1.9 Update or an earlier version.
• Convert your document to .doc, .xls, or .ppt, by using Open XML Converter.

There is a more simple fix: Open file formats as ODF and more competition. Maybe you'd better try other word processors for instance Openoffice for Mac or Neooffice?

If you have time to read it, there are probably nice bits in there.

Microsoft will be the "social host" of the Seattle meetings, hosting the reception and dinner, etc. They will also be organizing a Document Interoperability Initiative (DII) event to occur the day after the SC34 Plenary, at Microsoft, to announce how they intent to support Office 2010 as extensions to OOXML.

The previous DII event organised by Microsoft in Brussels was basically a meeting of the Microsoft ecosystem.

Here is the announcement of the meeting on the SC34 website:

For general questions about Westin meeting logistics, or things to do around Seattle, please contact Dave Welsh, moc.tfosorcim|hslewmd#moc.tfosorcim|hslewmd, cell phone +1 206 313 0879.

[…]

More hotel options, at different rates, are also available. For more hotel options in the immediate Bellevue area and the Seattle vicinity, please try Live.com.

[…]

Located in downtown Bellevue, just twenty minutes outside Seattle, The Westin Bellevue is situated minutes from major corporate offices including Microsoft, Nintendo of America, T-Mobile, and Expedia.

You can expect a lot of people member of the Microsoft ecosystem at the next SC34 meeting in Redmond.

A word processor including a native XML file format is provided. The well formed XML file fully represents the word-processor document, and fully supports 100% of word-processor's rich formatting. There are no feature losses when saving the word-processor documents as XML. A published XSD file defines all the rules behind the word-processor's XML file format. Hints may be provided within the XML associated files providing applications that understand XML a shortcut to understanding some of the features provided by the word-processor. The word-processing document is stored in a single XML file. Additionally, manipulation of word-processing documents may be done on computing devices that do not include the word-processor itself.

Inventors: Jones; Brian M. (Redmond, WA), Bishop; Andrew K. (Redmond, WA), Snyder; Daniel R. (Bellevue, WA), Sawicki; Marcin (Kirkland, WA), Little; Robert A. (Redmond, WA), Krueger; Anthony D. (Woodinville, WA)
Assignee: Microsoft Corporation (Redmond, WA)
Appl. No.: 11/005,183
Filed: December 6, 2004

manoj87

Find Lawyer

The supporters of ODF should react to this. I therefore propose the following actions:

- Ask the ODF Alliance to publish a press release recommending not using the "Save as ODF" facility included MS Office SP2, due to the bad quality of the produced ODF files.

The ODF Alliance issued a press release on 28-Apr-09 saying:

The ODF Alliance today welcomed the release of Microsoft’s Service Pack 2 for Office 2007, a software update that provides long-awaited support for the OpenDocument Format (ODF), while cautioning governments to evaluate the new software to ensure sufficient interoperability with other ODF-supporting applications.
[…]
"Microsoft has dragged its feet for over three years now. The key test will be whether Microsoft’s support for ODF plays well with other ODF-supporting software,” continued Marcich. “Governments will want to further evaluate the support for ODF provided by Microsoft and whether it sufficiently meets their needs for greater openness and interoperability.”

The initial tests made by Rob Weir shows the very bad interoperability delivered, and I think that a warning to the users is deserved.

- Start a petition asking Microsoft to make MS Office SP2 unavailable until the design flaws in the product have been corrected.

We must make it clear to Microsoft that their attitude is not acceptable, and force them to behave in a better way.

Would it work to promote OOXML and the next generation ooxml implementations (let us coin them code name "Greenhorn")? eWeek's Larry Seltzer:

Obviously, Microsoft would like to have us all move to the new formats, mostly by virtue of moving to Office 2007, but that's not happening soon and Microsoft's not making us do it. In fact, Office 2003 will be getting security updates for five more years, until April 8, 2014, the same date security fixes for Windows XP will end.

Needless to say that this is about the implementation. He is speaking here about earlier implementations to support the format. He talks about support for the format as such.

…the damage from targeted attacks can be immense, and many users may be exposed. If Microsoft is going to claim to support the old formats for five more years, it needs to make security updates for them a high priority for five more years.

You can be sure that the corpus of existing binary document formats will be continued to be supported. The only revelevant question is if the next generation will be OOXML or ODF.

Will we listen to the binary insecurity tune to force customers to upgrade?

Whether OOXML Wins Or Not, Older MS Docs Aren't Safe

Here is another one to sell the next Office generation: the old binary formats are not "open". Diabolic laughter included.

29500 Defects: Explanation of whether to resolve defects by Corrigendum or by Amendment

Defects in ISO/IEC 29500:2008
Explanation of whether to resolve defects
by Corrigendum or by Amendment
ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 34/WG4
2009-03-26
[…]

However, ISO/IEC 29500 is a very large and complex multi-part standard, and it is not surprising that the text contains many unintentional technical defects, which nevertheless don't make it impossible to implement the standard.

In the course of drafting, some existing office document features were unintentionally overlooked, which result in it being impossible to fully represent some of the corpus of existing documents in ISO/IEC 29500.

The corpus of existing documents probably means Office 2007 documents, which is an undocumented file format.

Here is the email I sent to the SC34 chairman:

From Benjamin Henrion <gro.iiff|noirnehb#gro.iiff|noirnehb>
to moc.liamg|12homas#moc.liamg|12homas
date Fri, Apr 17, 2009 at 4:53 PM
subject Definition of an "existing document"

Dear Chairman of SC34,

I would like to submit a request and a comment by having read the
following text:

0036(pdf) 29500 Defects: Explanation of whether to resolve defects by
Corrigendum or by Amendment

http://www.itscj.ipsj.or.jp/sc34/wg4/archive/sc34-wg4-2009-0036.pdf

"In the course of drafting, some existing office document features
were unintentionally overlooked, which result in it
being impossible to fully represent some of the corpus of existing
documents in ISO/IEC 29500."

Can you provide a definition of what an "existing documents" means?

Best regards,

—
Benjamin Henrion <bhenrion at ffii.org>
FFII Brussels - +32-484-566109 - +32-2-4148403

Let's have a look what definition they provide.

The document N1101/N1168 contains for example, several items in which they recognize that there are decisions made in the BRM (BRM resolutions) which were not incorporated into the final published text of the standard. In other words, even taking almost a year after the aproval of the standard to publish the text (yes, approved without reading), there wasn’t time/attention or anything else necessary to assure that the changes were published in the text (most of those changes, “conditioned” the approval). What makes me much more angry about this is that during the BRM I asked about who would be responsible for verifying that all these changes would be part of the final text and the answer was ITTF (kind of joint ISO/IEC secretariat).

He may be wrong that this is the final proof of misconduct at the BRM under the lead of Alex Brown and its mission impossible to fix the standard. Following the shocking uncoverings Jesper Lund Stocholm, Alex Brown and Doug Mahugh are acting like little school girls with their gossip and giggles on Twitter. But there may be method to the madness. OOXML is already approved by ISO JTC1. Microsoft no longer needs to persuade the national bodies or influence the press or call out their business partners. It is enough for them to rely on social engineering in SC34, shmoozing, sponsorships, free dinners, free beer, etc.

The reporting of Groklaw about the Microsoft outbursts of unfiltered truth and sillyness made Alex Brown hit back to BRM allegations and he claims the British BSI did not do its job, didn't review ODF properly:

Fact is though, we (the team) did NOT read ODF - we merely made a rapid pass through parts of the text over half a day, looking for obvious problems. Even so, the UK generated by far the greatest number of NB comments. This fact tells you all you need to know about the degree of scrutiny ODF got in its JTC 1 ballot. If you believe it was studied in detail in the UK, you are very wrong. … We learned from our ODF mistake, and rectified our errors [with open xml].

Pamela Jones of Groklaw answers to his flamebait:

Now, as it happens, I have formed the impression that you and the the MS elves want to "interoperate" with ODF so Microsoft forces can take it over, since even you must now realize that OOXML will never work and will never be adopted.

«In order to be answered, you have to be a client of Microsoft, as by article 9 of law 54/2008, there is a "duty of cooperation" which means that the survey must be answered, says Rui Seabra, vice-president of the board of ANSOL, in the association's blog.

The survey aims to be a guide for evaluation of the risks in the area of public procurement and granting public benefits, so Rui wonders «why a Council for Corruption Prevention is benefiting Microsoft.»

A reply to a citizen's email who questioned this practice was found to be extremely revealing: it's all about vendor lock-in. An extensive analysis (in portuguese) details many technical misconsiderations made by the Account's Court, some of them quite unreasonable:

• that Microsoft's binary and XML formats are open standards
• considers Microsoft's OSP an acceptable software license
• that since they use Microsoft, others must use Microsoft
• OpenDocument Format is used by a small number of people (perhaps the state should not have wheelchair ramps since wheelchairs are used by a small number of people), and would require installing third party software

The reply actually tries to turn the third item into the worse problem, and avoids the matter of granting an exclusive benefit to Microsoft, which would go directly against the objectives of the survey.

The conference will be held in Bucharest - details on http://www.eliberatica.ro

Romania is still a "red mark" on Microsoft's empire map: no official discussions about OpenDocument at government's level, Excel studied in Economics University (ASE http://www.ase.ro) like the Bible, no OpenOffice.org or alternative software in schools, OLPC program furiously rejected by Romania's think-tank senators ("this toy computer can't even run Microsoft Word !")…

Even Romania's president officially thanks to Bill Gates on his visit in Romania because "an entire generation of IT professionals grew up illegally copying Microsoft Office" and "Microsoft is an important, strategic partner to Romania's govermnent"…

Maybe Eliberatica it's a good occasion to inform Romanian public at large about the OOXML corruption scandal, the importance of real standards and the peril of proprietary software ?

Can someone please help?

We’re going to continue working closely with others in the IT industry - customers, partners, competitors and developers, including those in open source communities. They will help identify and solve interoperability challenges. As we mentioned earlier, this is a time of change. We’ve made some progress and we’re going to continue taking steps toward fostering greater interoperability.

Also the terms openness and interoperability are embraced in the article as if the company was going to apply for OFE membership and to stop obstruction of forceful Slovak proposals in the European Parliament for better interoperability (which were initially overlooked).

We also find a reference to a public affairs forum:

One forum where this takes place is in the Interoperability Executive Customer (IEC) Council, which consists of more than 35 CIOs and CTOs from governments and leading corporations around the world. The IEC Council helps Microsoft identify and solve the top challenges facing customers today. Working with them, we’re actively resolving issues in the areas of systems management, security and identity management, as well as office productivity and collaboration tools.

Not IEC as in ISO/IEC. That acronym overlap seems to be just a coincidence. It was established in 2006 and made no significant impact on the OOXML process. Details about the process can be found here.

Anyway, what is hot? You know these PRs make you suspicious. They are usually sent out when something is going on. Texas to go for open document formats? One year old news. And I am convinced no one is aware of the Dutch economist message which could be turned into an openness tsunami in the context of recent bailout spending madness:

Governments should seriously consider to act as leading customers to enhance competition on the market for PC operating systems, office applications and enterprise content management software, suggest micro economists at the Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis (CPB). Governments should also require open source software in public procurement.

The CPB economists write these three markets are 'tentative examples' of inefficient markets. Such markets suffer from vendor lock-in and the lack of competition is stifling innovation. Normal economic processes are not strong enough to correct such failing markets. "This will not lead to optimal choices of licensing, price, quality and innovation."

Paoli's colleague Craig Shank has a different concept: vendors help governments to make the most of their IT.

This is a time of change. Increasing globalization, rising Internet use, and higher consumer and business expectations are driving increased demand for technology choice and flexibility. Governments and businesses alike have assembled a diverse mix of applications and technologies from a variety of vendors. In this environment, technology can present new opportunities and deliver new solutions. Key to that is helping organizations make the most of their mixed IT environments.

"Vendor capture" as economists call that. Don't expect any trade association to lobby against it. This has to be left to common sense and the ethos of public officials who want to keep their independence. A focus on market order improvements, even in times of bulk emergency keynesian spending on broadband, green-IT and ICT education remains important. In the current situation I am sure a "microbillion" for interoperability actions can be made available in many nations around the world. Crumps for common sense, free markets and more openness.

Mandatory ODF policies are only a small step in a long transformation process in the field of communications technologies but it is time to walk the talk. The financial markets have shown that we cannot afford to lean back on the regulatory side as society as a whole suffers the consequences.

Fraunhofer Fokus is also represented in the DIN document committee for document formats. There it was a proponent of the adoption of the questionable OpenXML format while German government representatives sent furious protest letters. Now Fraunhofer is in the news again:

February 23, 2009 Microsoft partners with Fraunhofer Fokus
Fraunhofer Fokus recently announced a new project to create an IS29500-Validator and Document-Library. The project will test the validity of documents regarding conformance to ISO/IEC 29500. As part of the project activities Fraunhofer Fokus will initiate the development of an Open Source document validator.

Fraunhofer FOKUS initiates its new Document-Interoperability-Lab. The lab will test the validity of documents regarding the document-standard ISO/IEC 29500 known as Office Open XML. As part of the lab activities Fraunhofer Fokus will initiate the Open Source development of a document validator. Additionally a library consisting of valid test and template documents will be offered. Word processing, presentation as well as spreadsheet documents will be taken into consideration. Microsoft Corporation will support these activities as development partner.

The question is who will trust the research results of Fraunhofer Fokus? And why does the German tax payer invest in a research institution that sells out to companies across the Atlantic regardless of our national public interest in interoperability? For instance Fraunhofer Fokus applauded(!) the ISO adoption of Open XML.

• 2008-04-09 Fraunhofer FOKUS begrüßt die ISO-Normierung DIS 29500 von Office Open XML

Fraunhofer DIN NIA person Gerd Schürmann sent also emails that seemed to be equivalent to those of Microsoft's Mario Wendt. Let's look if the document experts can validate that. Does it make you feel comfortable that Schuermann was named for the DIN NIA 43 subcommittee which deals with translation matters of ISO/IEC 26300 (ODF) and ISO 29500 (OOXML)?

Here is what Doug Mahugh is saying on the ODF mailing-list:

It's worth noting that the ODF metadata mechanisms don't allow for the use of a private/custom schema to tag content within a document. And that use case has value to many users. So if we decide that ODF won't be able to support those types of scenarios, for whatever reason, we should not be surprised to find that users who need such capabilities will look elsewhere.

Consider the trivial example of a pre-existing document, created years ago, which needs to be logged in to a content management system that requires an abstract to be identified for each document. If the format of the document is HTML, then a div with class="abstract" can be used to tag the appropriate paragraph(s) as the abstract. If the format of the document is DOCX, a customXml element with element="abstract" can be used for the same purposes. In both cases the document content remains valid HTML or WordprocessingML, while the user adds the custom semantics required for their purpose. The custom semantics can be (and should be) ignored by others. The user is free to innovate quickly, and does not have to think in terms of a tradeoff between strict compliance and flexibility/business value. They can, and do, have the best of both worlds in such scenarios: strict compliance to a standard, and freedom to innovate quickly for their own specialized purposes.

I think ODF would benefit from being as supportive of such scenarios as HTML, IS29500 and other formats already are. No committee can anticipate every possible class of extension that users might find useful, so I think the format itself should allow for clean, simple tagging of content according to schemas that may never be standardized, and may never be widely known or used. Done correctly, such tagging puts no burden on simple interoperability between word processors (which typically ignore it), but can enable other types of interoperability that many people find valuable.

- Doug

There is only one way to do interoperability at Microsoft: embrace and extend. "Freedom to innovate" here means "Freedom to embrace and extend", or "Freedom for Microsoft to add proprietary patented extensions that makes users dependent on Microsoft technologies".

Time to join the ODF TC!

An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could gain the same user rights as the local user. Users whose accounts are configured to have fewer user rights on the system could be less affected than users who operate with administrative user rights.
In a Web-based attack scenario, an attacker would have to host a Web site that contains an Office file that is used to attempt to exploit this vulnerability. In addition, compromised Web sites and Web sites that accept or host user-provided content could contain specially crafted content that could exploit this vulnerability. An attacker would have no way to force users to visit a malicious Web site. Instead, an attacker would have to persuade them to visit the Web site, typically by getting them to click a link that takes them to the attacker's site.
The vulnerability cannot be exploited automatically through e-mail. For an attack to be successful a user must open an attachment that is sent in an e-mail message. Users who have installed and are using the Office Document Open Confirmation Tool for Office 2000 will be prompted with Open, Save, or Cancel before opening a document.

So users probably should be very cautious with .xlsx files sent to them until the risks are contained through security updates.

Background:

• PCmag
• Security Focus

It's fortunate that it didn't start pointing to an adult-related site… lol.

Keep in mind it is 'just' oil and gas. Petrol is elementary to keep you warm and your car running. You can buy it on a world market from multiple sources. Only oil companies and leftists believe that you need to go to war to secure access to petrol resources. But what about the real dependencies of regions like Europe on software and standards? The Russians are here about to lower these strategic dependencies in their national interest. The Open XML standardisation effort has shown to players in the IT business how ruthless it gets when strategic concerns come into play, and multinational corporations and governments are not much different here.

Most governments around the world already have a national operating system, it is called Windows and their tax payers have to pay large amounts of money for this national 'choice' to an American company. Fortunately it also contributes to the functioning of the political system through sponsoring of regulatory action, new career perspectives for politicians, sponsoring of an EU Presidency or reform of 'open standards' requirements. Ireland is a good place to base your software licensing business as the Irish government helps you with tax evasion.

A good reason why governments need Windows is an Office application and you can say it is their National Office Application. It only runs on Windows, has a cousin on the Mac and tinkerers sometimes manage to get it work under Linux occasionally, perhaps. Just ask, you find so many good excuses why it became their National Office Application and why they want it to remain their Office application. For instance because governments urgently need the Office software to process the files other people with the same software sent to them. Thus some governments backed the standardisation of the proprietary format through ISO. The OOXML saga.

Other governments want to be able to switch to other products or actually do that. Most of them migrate to Staroffice or [OpenOffice.org] which support the ODF format and the old binary doc format out of the box. Government agencies understand that a creation of an international standard as ODF was crucial to reduce their switching costs, they understood that only strong economic pressure would force Microsoft into full ODF compliance. Some governments also understand that you have to invest into alternative products and migration studies to further reduce the dependencies and built up the market pressure for interoperability.

I wonder if Russia will consider to develop its national word processor as well. A wise Russian will understand the danger to their national independence that a support for the Open XML format instead of ODF bears. If they have no opportunity but to chose Open XML it shows that their national independence is already compromised. When I went to the military part of the mission of military service was to shield our nation from foreign extortion. I wonder how these institutions can contribute to liberate our nations from these dependencies. Guns and nukes do not seem to help against the viral software sales model from Redmond. A clear software and interoperability strategy and effective action does help, as long as governments do not fraternise with the opponent of their national interest.

Andrew Tridgell, …, did not speak about this subject; rather he focused on the way Microsoft manouevred the OOXML standard through the International Standards Organisation last year, using means which are widely acknowledged as being non-kosher.

Tridgell said Microsoft had subverted the entire standards process by ramming the OOXML standard through and the company should make reparations, including an apology.

Last year there was a bunch of other outraged persons in Norway. I leave it to you for now to make up your mind how this relates to recent unexpected developments on the European level you find in the news. CTO Hakon Wium Lie explained what powers their entrepreneurial success in a Geneva conference: Genuine Open Standards and adherence of their competitors to them. As a coincidence the Open Forum Europe event happened to take place at the same time and in the same building as the Ballot Resolution Meeting for OOXML.

Poor Lawrence Crumpton.

We were particularly pleased to see the issue of software patents addressed in a manner that prevents them being used to hinder competition rather than the original purpose of patent law, to promote innovation. We are concerned about the current state of the standards process, as evidenced by the recent ISO process relating to a standard that no-one implements "Open XML" which appears to be achieving full recognition in spite of safeguards in the standards process rather than because of them.

Other contributions can be found here. Although Microsoft said it wants to offer Open XML patent licensing on a royalty-free base it strongly advocates against the existing European interoperability definition of open standards which currently provides for no patent restrictions. Of course it doesn't. The American company writes to the Commission:

The discussion of standards and technical specifications is necessary, and would serve the requirements of an interoperability framework better without the redefinition of the meaning of “open standards” carried over from EIF 1.0.

For IT professionals it might sound odd that a term as 'open standards' the EU Interoperability Framework explains correctly is suddenly described as a redefinition by the very company that redefines it and invested so much in lobbying. You are lying, yells the liar.

The European Interoperability Framework 1.0 is so popular because it adapts to business reality. This is why the contributions to the EIF update process which lead to an EIF2 have a specific political relevance for software professionals in Europe. If foreign companies succeed to subvert terminology and standards driven by their commercial interests, what role for Europeans whom their administrations and standard bodies are supposed to serve?

NORMAPME is an international non-profit association created in 1996 with the support of the European Commission, under the full name of the "European Office of Crafts, Trades and Small and Medium- Sized Enterprises for Standardisation".

NORMAPME is the unique European organisation focused on small enterprise interests in the European standardisation system. Its members represent over 11 million enterprises in all European countries, including all EU and EFTA member states.

In a letter to CEN members and National mirror committees of ISO JTC1 NormAPME asked these decision makers to disapprove the Open XML format. The document that was leaked to us is dated 26 of march 2008. The text fully endorses the common criticism of the format, but director Loucas Gourtsoyannis who signed the letter added another aspect to the communication:

The standard drafting process did not guarantee the involvement [of] all interested stakeholders, including SMEs. Instead it was monopolized by Microsoft.

You might argue that SMEs do not implement or develop Open XML. Small and medium sized companies exercise (pretty) weak procurement power. They have to take what is dictated by market consensus. A standard process is not only relevant to the different vendors, notably Microsoft, IBM, SUN, Adobe et al., but also to buyers as consumers and regular SME customers. Small and medium sized companies are the backbone of the European economy and unlike larger players they don't pay taxes in offshore-irelands or ask for state aid but contribute to domestic prosperity, job and wealth creation and fiscal income. Organisations as NORMAPME ensure that the SME's voice gets heard and their interests are better reflected in a standard process.

A real surprise to many observer of the Open XML debate was that most of the usual suspects of SME astroturf were not called to arms in the Open XML standard struggle. The new turf Voices for Innovation seriously lacked maturity and didn't take off. The attempt appeared rather foolish. Vendor capture was not restrained but frank, as if European standard setting was the natural domain of European sales departments and partners. Another indication of SME weakness in the process.

As now all relevant sides agree that the ISO fasttrack process needs reform, I am curious what proposals the standard technocrats in Europe will come up with to strengthen true SME representation in the standard setting process. New instruments of competition law are expected to be developed to overcome the misrepresentation problem for which OOXML became a paradigm. How to crack down on future standard voting cartells in Europe and foreign influence? I wonder what reform suggestions NORMAPME would make.

One aspect is evident, the interests of 11 million European SME need to be better reflected in standard setting, to get on an equal footing with multinational vendors.

Here is the letter for the ECMA376v1:

Here is the letter for the ECMA376v2:

If you have some time, you could transcript it for blind people and bloggers to quote it.

ECMA has also a good sense of humor (the right source is a PPT presentation about ECMA):

Patents: Solid and proven patent policy and practice:

The General Assembly of Ecma shall not approve
recommendations of Standards which are covered by
patents when such patents will not be licensed by their
owners on a reasonable and non-discriminatory basis.”

However, Ecma does not:

• Assess the essentiality and validity of patents for implementation of a standard, nor
• Conduct patent searches for patents used in standards, nor
• Define the term “Reasonable And Non Discriminatory” (RAND)

We have requested a commercial patent license in July, but radio silence since then on the Microsoft side. Yet another proof that the patent system does not work.

The ECMA code of conduct in patent matters is here:

1. Policy
General Declaration:
The General Assembly of Ecma shall not approve recommendations of Standards which are covered by patents when such patents will not be licensed by their owners on a reasonable and non-discriminatory basis.

1.1
In case the proposed Standard is covered by issued patents of Ecma members only: Members of the General Assembly are asked to state the Company licensing policy with respect to these patents.

I wonder what the latest requirement means. Nobody knows exactly which Microsoft patents covers the specification. Nobody has ever seen the list.

Even The Register covers the story:

Microsoft has today released a plug-in for Firefox that allows Open XML documents to be viewed within the popular open source browser. The software giant said that its new Open XML Document Viewer works within Firefox and can be used on Windows and Linux platforms without needing a local installation of MS Office. .. So today’s announcement will be seen – by MS at least – as going some way to placate the firm’s naysayers.

Let's check the source.

Interoperability solutions announced today translate Open XML documents to a Web page (HTML) allowing readability on Web-friendly browsers such as Firefox,…

There are two kinds of people. Those who don't get it and those who enjoy the failblog. Those who enjoy the failblog may also wonder why the referenced document is called 12-03DIIBrusselsPR.mspx.

Anyway, at present also the ISO standard ODF is supported by Firefox through inadequate and experimental plugin solutions.

The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has published the specification for a Microsoft-created file format that caused bitter debate during its path to become an international standard.

The documentation for Office Open XML (OOXML) runs 7,228 pages and can be ordered on CD from the ISO for 342 Swiss francs (US$285). The specification is named ISO/IEC DIS 29500:2008.

Microsoft won a hard-fought battle in April when the ISO announced enough countries voted to approve OOXML as an international standard.

OOXML was opposed by many on grounds it was unneeded, as software makers could use OpenDocument Format (ODF), a less complicated office software format that was already an international standard.

The debate became so embittered that IBM, which backs ODF, threatened in September to consider leaving standards bodies that allowed dominant companies such as Microsoft to wield what it perceived as undue influence. Microsoft was accused of leaning on countries in order to secure enough votes for OOXML to pass.

ISO has also made a press release, referring to file formats produced by a particular vendor:

This defines a set of XML elements and attributes, over and above those defined by ISO/IEC 29500-1, that provide support for legacy Microsoft Office applications; that is, those prior to the 2008 release. It specifies requirements for Office Open XML consumers and producers that comply to the transitional conformance category.

BoycottNovell got the message right:

By the way, do you know when is the official burial date of ISO?

Who pays for interoperability in public IT procurement?

A public letter to the IT industry about document format standards

Delft, 16 November 2008

L.S.,

It is not uncommon for governments to voluntarily head for vendor
lock-in[1]. As a citizen, however, I have a direct stake in my
government basing its public procurement of IT on open standards. This
stake may be most evident for 'civil ICT standards' (Andy Updegrove),
i.e., for standards that support access to government information and
exchanges with government such as document formats[2] (e.g.,
sustainable digital data). However, I also have a standards-related
stake in IT procured for government-internal processes because, first,
in practice government-internal and –external IT processes cannot be
separated[3]. Second, because of the increasing costs that accompany
vendor-lock-in. Third, because government procurement is good for 16%
of the European IT market and is therefore a means towards a more
competitive and sustainable IT market.

A main reason for voluntary vendor lock-in is the fear of lack of
interoperability of IT products in a multi-vendor environment.
Experience shows that standard-compliant products from different
vendors need not necessarily interoperate. As is known, a dominant
vendor may design in incompatibility to break the integrity of a
standard (e.g. Java platform). But usually incompatible standard
implementations are the unhappy outcome of good intentions.

Problem of document format standards

In the field of document formats there is an additional complexity.
For the external reader: ISO[4] has ratified two competing
XML-oriented standards for document formats. The first one, the Open
Document Format (ODF, ISO/IEC 26300) was ratified in 2006 and stems
from OASIS, a standards consortium. The second one, Office Open XML
(OOXML, ISO/IEC 29500) originally stems from Ecma International,
another standards consortium. Although ISO's OOXML process has been
widely contested, which caused a delay in its final approval,
according to the ISO website the standards is to be published shortly.

ISO's approval of a second, overlapping standard will not have
lessened government fears about interoperability in a multi-vendor
environment. The market has become less rather than more transparent
by means of this standards effort. To re-create some transparency
about the interoperability of applications and reduce the fear of post
hoc expenses in public procurement, conformance and interoperability
testing is needed. Plug-test events are needed to test the factual
interoperability of standards-based products from different vendors.
To be credible to all concerned, a neutral, independent testing centre
such as ETSI may need to be involved to e.g. develop test-suites and
coordinate plug test events.

Interoperability between multi-vendor OOXML applications

Current discussions on open standards highlight that multiple
implementations are an important sign that standards are really open
(see presentations by Rishab Gosh and by Thiru Balasubramaniam[5]).
Regarding ISO's OOXML, the contention is that no company has yet
implemented the full standard, not even its primary sponsor Microsoft;
and that the six thousand page specification is too complex and too
inconsistent to implement. Are these contentions true? If not,
governments will want more than verbal claims to the contrary.
Moreover, they can easily be countered with third party conformance
and interoperability tests, including a plug-test event with multiple
OOXML-compliant IT vendors.

Interoperability between ODF applications

All major vendors, Microsoft included, have agreed to support ODF
ISO/IEC 26300, or are already doing so. That is, the availability of
multiple implementations is not a problem here. Moreover,
interestingly, two weeks ago OASIS initiated a technical committee to
organize conformance and interoperability tests. Given its scope[6],
this committee will provide transparency to governments about the
degree of conformance of applications to ODF and the interoperability
of ODF-documents. Less clear is whether the committee also intends to
address interoperability between standards versions, or more general:
what policy it has on standards change[7]. To my knowledge, such
policies have not yet been defined by any standards consortium or
standards body. They would befit the area of civil ICT standards.

The OASIS committee explicitly does not address "identifying or
commenting on particular implementations" or any certification
activities. Government procurement officers will ultimately need
testing at this level and want to involve an independent third party
testing centre for this purpose. Moreover, OASIS, too, might at a
later stage want to involve an independent third party in order to
avoid credibility problems.

Having two overlapping standards brings about its own problems, as
testifies a review of current ad hoc solutions - converters,
translators, plug-ins - to re-create compatibility between
ODF-products and Microsoft's partial implementation of the OOXML
standard[8]. Those who develop a low quality and overlapping standard,
qualifications which also OOXML supporters use, are not the ones who
pay for the consequences. Regrettably, citizens will be paying the
price for lack of interoperability.

Although there is no formal accountability to fall back upon in
standardization[9], those who initiated the duplicating effort may
feel a - corporate social - responsibility for what happened. Their
help is needed to shift interoperability costs from governments and
citizens (post hoc) back to IT vendors (ex ante), the source of the
interoperability problem. As a start, will they fully cooperate and
support OASIS' initiative of conformance and interoperability testing?
Are they prepared to shoulder the costs of independent, third party
conformance and interoperability tests, tests that are needed to
assure governments that no unexpected problems will arise ex post?

Kind regards,

Tineke Egyedi

Delft University of Technology

A while ago, I was riding my mountain bike under the deluge, with plenty of mud on the eyes, I was unable to ride correctly, it was dangerous. Now it seems that Alex Brown has also some mud in the eyes:

The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) requested at the beginning of October that ODF maintenance work be aligned between Oasis and ISO, in a move that Groklaw's Pamela Jones described as "a takeover attempt of ODF". Groklaw alleged that ISO's SC34 committee, which oversees the development of Microsoft's rival OOXML format, was "tilted by Microsoft employees". SC34 would be in charge of ISO's ODF work.

However, Alex Brown, the convener of SC34, told ZDNet Asia sister site ZDNet UK at the time that Jones's post was "chock-full of misinformation and spin". ISO/IEC standards have to be managed and published by ISO/IEC committees even if they are created elsewhere, Brown said.

Dear Mr Brown, who paid the dinner in Korea? How many Microsoft employees were around the table?

The RAND terminology is confusing because RAND is not well defined and covers a zoo of patent licensing schemes. Of course RAND terms can also be free of charge, this is the case with some RAND licensing models, e.g. FRAND. RAND-Z licenses are "zero fee". However, even royalty-free RAND standards may impose other restrictions. The litmus test whether an international standard is really "royalty-free" without undue restrictions, also known as an essential condition for an "open standard", is whether it enabled implementations under the GNU GPL. If participants in the standard process chose to make it voluntarily an "open standard" ISO does not provide a standard scheme on how to indemnify implementers and users. They don't have a standard RF license. The field of patent indemnification license models is still under development. Just have a look at the collection of licensing and indemnification models at the patent commons website. No one really knows which model is legally safe and sound on a world wide scale as international private law is very much diverse. Certainly trust into the licensor comes into play here.

The main sponsor behind OOXML, the Microsoft Corporation, assured the European Commission that they would chose a RF model for their future Office format.¹ However, their public affairs representatives repeatedly casted doubt whether their chosen patent license model would enable implementations under the GNU GPL and forcefully lobbied domestic and oversees legislators against open standards. The intense struggle has two levels. On one layer the question is RAND or RF as appropriate licensing conditions, on a second layer the attempt was to redefine the terminology of "open standards" to become RAND compatible. A "success" of the lobbying effort was the ITU-T definition of "open standards" drafted by a patent attorney working group which made the limbo for RAND licensing conditions. As an effect all international standards would become "open standards". It comes at no surprise that vendors are sceptical about the honesty of the Microsoft patent schemes and are suspicious about hidden agendas.

Following criticism of the first model, the CNS, Microsoft came up with an Open Specification Promise as their new favourite patent indemnification model. In the FAQ they deliberately leave the question of GPL applicability open and stress that the OSP "does not need to be sublicensable".

The Open Specification Promise is a simple and clear way to assure that the broadest audience of developers and customers working with commercial or open source software can implement the covered specification(s). We leave it to those implementing these technologies to understand the legal environments in which they operate. This includes people operating in a GPL environment. Because the General Public License (GPL) is not universally interpreted the same way by everyone, we can’t give anyone a legal opinion about how our language relates to the GPL or other OSS licenses, but based on feedback from the open source community we believe that a broad audience of developers can implement the specification(s).

Recently a new item was added to the OSP FAQ:

Q: I am a developer/distributor/user of software that is licensed under the GPL, does the Open Specification Promise apply to me?
A: Absolutely, yes. The OSP applies to developers, distributors, and users of Covered Implementations without regard to the development model that created such implementations, or the type of copyright licenses under which they are distributed, or the business model of distributors/implementers. The OSP provides the assurance that Microsoft will not assert its Necessary Claims against anyone who make, use, sell, offer for sale, import, or distribute any Covered Implementation under any type of development or distribution model, including the GPL.

We will see how future updates of the Open Specification Promise (OSP) would reflect this policy. The uncertainty causes many vendors to ask for other bilateral patent indemnification agreements. Some persons who do not trust the OSP asked Microsoft for the text of the FRAND license (mentioned in the ISO documents) as the third available model along CNS and OSP but had no success. Apparently such a third license model is not provided contrary to earlier formal statements and the argument is raised that the OSP would obsolete the third FRAND license.

Continuing the reading of the document, I found at the “Acclamations Section” a particular item, that would transcribe here:

Acclamation C:

SC 34 expresses its appreciation to Microsoft Korea for sponsoring the dinner of Sept 29th.

I’d rather not write here any comment or conclusion about it, but I really would like to read the your comments.

Things like these which cause reactions such as the members of the Norway’s NB, that simply abandoned ISO (cheers to them).

I am also pretty sure that other participants to this meeting had their flight ticket paid by Redmond. I personally do not have the finances to afford such expensive flight tickets, hotels, and so on.

Physical meeting is the ISO way to exclude participation.

And (I did hint we might come down from being high-minded) talking of copyright violation I notice some of the dafter quarters of the web have published the ISO/IEC 29500:2008 (OOXML) text. Now, while not many people know for sure what ITTF do to a text when they prepare it for publication, one thing they do do for sure is to put a copyright statement on every page. So what we have witnessed is a brazen act of copyright violation. The boobies have even been so good as to boast about the bandwidth requirements their crimes have occasioned (no further questions, m'lud). Even now, I can hear those Geneva lawyers licking their lips over this one …

After all, the Standards Bodies needs money to pay their staff. Here is the position of the Finish Standards Body about free standards available online:

Recommendation 10 - Free standards

SFS is strongly against the free delivery of the ENs.

If EN standards on ICT sector will be free:

• The coherency of the national standardization system will be distorted which will have negative impact on the legal IPR of the NSBs at European level as well as globally.
• It also has impacts on the NSBs economy, whose business model is very much leaning on the sales of standards.
• One of the most important issue is the marketing of the standards (and thus enhancing the use of standards) ­ it's not attractive for NSBs to make standards available, if they can't have any economic benefit for their attempts. Who will publish, promote and make EN standards available if they are free?
• If EN standards will be made available by some other channels, who will guarantee that they really are available and the collection is kept up-to-date? Who cares for the revisions and corrections? Which are the other channels, and how will customers find them? Will availability of standards be equal to all stakeholders and all users? Who will assist the users (SMEs!) in the implementation of EN standards?
• It will be difficult to define which standards belong to ICT sector ­ the classification between ICT and other sectors will become unclear.
• The visibility of the EN standard on ICT sector could actually be much worse than it is now.
• Internet is not a solution; Internet as a channel to deliver products is not free for the provider.

Respect for IP! At least in Taiwan, they do promote it:

Meanwhile, you could start to check if the approved comments are well integrated in the "specification":

1. 1080.pdf
2. OfficeOpenXML-WordprocessingMLArtBorders.zip
3. OfficeOpenXML-SpreadsheetMLStyles.zip
4. OfficeOpenXML-DrawingMLGeometries.zip
5. OfficeOpenXML-RELAXNG-Strict.zip
6. OfficeOpenXML-XMLSchema-Strict.zip

The specification contains 'legacy' parts to be compliant with the existing bugs of one vendor:

For legacy reasons, an implementation using the 1900 backward compatibility date base system shall treat 1900 as though it was a leap year. [Note: That is, serial value 59 corresponds to February 28, and serial value 61 corresponds to March 1, the next day, allowing the (non-existent) date February 29 to have the serial value 60. end note] A consequence of this is that for dates between January 1 and February 28, WEEKDAY shall return a value for the day immediately prior to the correct day, so that the (non-existent) date February 29, 1900, has a day-of-the-week that immediately follows that of February 28, and immediately precedes that of March 1, 1900.

Don't write standards for one vendor!

partial quote from PJ:

Guess what the SC 34 committee, the ISO/IEC committee responsible for OOXML, is up to now? I call it a takeover attempt of ODF, according to my reading of the published notes of the most recent meeting held yesterday, October 1st, and starring a document titled "Request to JTC 1 for alignment of OASIS and JTC 1 Maintenance Procedures." Uh oh. That sounds polite, but it is what it is. An attempted coup. They have already sent a "Liaison Statement" to OASIS. Surrender or else, what? SC 34 asks JTC 1 "to establish with OASIS a synchronised mechanism for maintenance of ISO/IEC 26300 and to inform SC 34 of the outcome." I gather they think they can do a better job of maintaining ODF than OASIS. What will JTC 1 do, do you think? You doubt they will hop on to this wonderful plan?

13 members of the TC in Norway has left their Standards Body in protest. They say that the Standards Body has lost its credibility in the IT area. Remember that Standards Norway was voting Yes with the support of only 2 companies (Microsoft and Statoil), and against the will of the rest of the technical committee (read our previous article "Norway: 21 "No", 2 "Yes" and Microsoft still gets its way?"). Here is also a list of irregularities of the broken Norwegian process.

Here is a rough google translation of the letter sent by the 13 :

Oslo, Monday 29 september 2008

We, the undersigned, are ending our work within Standard Norway.

It is sad when organizations that work for our common interest fail the task. Through the OOXML work Standard Norway has shown, with a clear margin, that they are not fit to represent Norway in the ISO.

"Standardization of formats for content on the Web is more important than ever. A large part of mankind's communication is done digitally, and all - ALL - must have the ability to read and write these formats," said Håkon Wium Lie.

Standard Norway chose to defy their own technical committee and vote yes to a specification that is immature, useless, and unworthy of being called an ISO standard.

Standard Norway has lost its credibility in the IT area from the way it has administered the process. Standard Norway has set its own commercial interests ahead of what is best for society, most feasible technologically, and what is professionally advisable. "By participating in a further work in Standard Norway will we lose our professional credibility," said Arne S. Nielsen.

Therefore, we have chosen to leave the committee.

We end our work with Standard Norway because:

* The administration of Standard Norway trust 37 identical letters from Microsoft partners more than their own technical committee.
* The process within Standard Norway has been unpredictable and the administration has changed the rules along the way.
* Standard Norway and ISO have committed a series of violations of their own rules and other irregularities in the OOXML process.

"Standard Norway has overruled hundreds of thousands of users in the public and private sectors", says Martin Bekkelund.

The mass-copied Microsoft-letter did not contain a single professional argument. Standard Norway first said that these kinds of statements would not be given any weight. However, at the end of the process they changed their mind and emphasized the Microsoft letters. Thereby, Standard Norway misled the committee members.

The process in Standard Norway is unpredictable, subjective and is continuously changed behind the scenes. "There is no way to appeal a decision, neither inside nor outside Standard Norway — the administrative staff who makes the decisions is the same who 'reviews' (i.e., lingers, ignores and shelves) appeals and complaints", says Trond Heier.

Each and every one of use will continue our for better standards within organizations other than Standard Norway.

The undersigned:

1. Haakon Wium Lie
2. Martin Bekkelund (NUUG)
3. Petter Reinholdtsen (NUUG)
4. Linpro AS v/ Trond Heier Linpro AS v / Trond Heier
5. Bjørn Venn
6. Steve Pepper
7. Arne Sigurd Rognan Nielsen
8. Henning Kulander
9. Axel Bojer
10. Geir Isene
11. Thomas Malt
12. Anthony Lardahl (NUUG)
13. Knut Olav Bøhmer Knut

It seems that Norwegians has also made the experience of the broken chairman phenomena, similar to what happened in other countries:

Jachwitz has been handling the case quite inconsistently. In the first SN/K 185 meeting, he demanded full agreement on any comments to be sent to ISO, meaning that the default vote in case one person wouldn't agree on any of the comments would be YES.

BRUSSELS — International Business Machines Corp. will review its membership in the bodies that set common standards for the technology industry and may withdraw from some, potentially undermining the system that makes electronic equipment and software interoperable world-wide.

The Armonk, N.Y.-based computer maker is expected to announce the review Tuesday, according to company officials. IBM has become frustrated by what it considers opaque processes and poor decision-making at some of the hundreds of bodies that set technical standards for everything from data-storage systems to programming languages, those officials said.

A recent battle over the selection as an international standard of the file format used in Microsoft Corp.'s Office software suite appears to have influenced IBM's decision. Microsoft, of Redmond, Wash., won that contest in April when its Open XML format was approved by the Geneva-based International Organization for Standardization, or ISO.

Standards are key to the tech industry, where they provide a common foundation for products from different manufacturers. Internet standards allow millions of computers to display a Web page the same way. IBM controls a vast cache of intellectual property in the high-tech field. As a result, its contributions and agreement are often critical to forming a standard.

IBM and open-source groups that support collaborative software development said Microsoft had stacked the national committees that make up the ISO with employees and sympathetic voters. They also said Open XML is so complicated and obscure that only Microsoft could fully exploit it, cementing the software company's already-considerable lead in office-document software. IBM backed a rival format called Open Document that was already certified as an ISO standard.

A Microsoft spokesman said standards bodies are "invaluable" because they provide "an even and predictable playing field" to the industry. Their decisions reflect the views of a preponderance of members, "not the interests of any single party," he said.

"There are lots of issues" with standards groups beyond the office-documents arena, said Bob Sutor, an IBM vice president who is the company's top standards official. He cited high membership fees that deter small players, complicated intellectual-property policies and opaque procedures.

In an interview, Mr. Sutor singled out for particular criticism Ecma International, a Geneva-based group of which IBM was a founding member more than 45 years ago. Ecma certified the Open XML standard over IBM's objection and submitted it to ISO for broader approval.

Getting a company-backed product approved as a standard can be a boon: In Microsoft's case, Open XML's certification eased hesitations by some government purchasing agents, who were reluctant to buy nonstandard software.

Istvan Sebestyen, Ecma's secretary-general, said he was "really amazed" at Mr. Sutor's contention that Ecma certification can be bought, and added he hadn't heard formally from IBM about any intention to withdraw. "Ecma didn't get one single dime more" from the Open XML approval, he said.

Write to Charles Forelle at moc.jsw|ellerof.selrahc#moc.jsw|ellerof.selrahc

Maybe ECMA can justify why they are producing so crappy standards with so many bugs inside?

Maybe someone reading this blog might want to draft an Open Letter to ECMA, asking them if they have not seen this guy redrafting the Fast Track rules in 2006 for a client from Redmond?

From: Voices for Innovation [mailto:eu@voicesforinnovation.info]
Sent: 22. september 2008
Subject: Policy Alert: Open Source activists secure close to 100 signatures in effort to mandate OSS

Open Source activists secure close to 100 signatures in effort to mandate OSS

Over the past few weeks radical elements in the open source community have intensified their efforts in the European Parliament. They are attempting to significantly change the existing public procurement framework, which follows a policy of technology neutrality, by introducing an open source software preference.

The Parliament’s current approach reflects a much more balanced view, as it uses both proprietary and open source technology. The Members of the European Parliament (MEPs overseeing the Parliament’s IT spending follow the clear line that the Parliament’s IT procurement choices must be based on reasonable and objective criteria, such as “interoperability, cost/value for money, reliability, vendor support, ease of use and security”, thus ensuring the best value for tax payers money. If the Parliament moves away from this established policy we must fear that the choice available to both citizens and institutions will be significantly reduced, limiting the functionality and user-friendliness of the European Parliament’s portals.

Next week their efforts will intensify further, as they are planning to approach Members of the European Parliament with the view of signing and supporting a draft entitled “Written Declaration on the use of Open-source software”. The draft has been tabled for consideration by MEPs in May and calls on the Parliament to migrate its entire computer network to Open Source software as a means to tackle the digital divide in Europe. Open Source proponents need to collect signatures of the 50% +1 Members of the European Parliament by next Thursday. At the moment they are far from reaching that number – clearly as many of the MEPs have seen through the ploy of masking an attempt to change the procurement policy of an institution, with a cause benefiting the disadvantaged members of our society.

It is unclear how the proponents of this draft Declaration draw a link between implementing an ‘Open-source software only’ policy in the European Parliament and confronting the challenges of the digital divide. The major challenges of the digital divide are widely regarded to be the consequence of limited access, poverty, social exclusion, personal factors (age, disability) or education and skills gaps. The exclusion of proprietary software models could potentially result in a significant increase of people without access to technology – thus achieving the exact opposite of what they set out to do - increasing the digital divide in Europe.

In order to address these challenges, governments, industry (including proprietary and OSS vendors) and civil society are already working together to drive greater awareness of the benefits of technology and investing in e-skills and education across the populations – see for example the European Alliance on Skills for Employability. The main goal of the Alliance is to help better co-ordinate industry and community investments, services and other offerings, dialogue and engagement with NGOs and public authorities in a way that enhances the positive impact of ICT literacy and professional training on employability prospects of the young, the disabled, older workers and other unemployed or under-employed people throughout the European Union – thereby seeking to address the digital divide.

The Written declaration therefore falls short of doing anything about its stated objective. In fact it does something much more radical, which many of the ones signing it might well not have been aware of – it drastically changes the procurement policies of European institutions, effectively excluding all but OSS solutions from its use.

Should you be interested in presenting an opinion to your local Member of Parliament please contact ofni.noitavonnirofseciov|ue#ofni.noitavonnirofseciov|ue

More information will be posted up on the following website https://www.voicesforinnovation.org/

Links to the written declaration can be found on the European Commission’s website http://osor.eu/news/meps-petition-european-parliament-switch-to-open-source

Here is the resolution in plain text:

EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT
2004- 2009

19.5.2008

0046/2008

WRITTEN DECLARATION
pursuant to Rule 116 of the Rules of Procedure by Jean Louis Cottigny, Pierre Pribetich, Michel Rocard, Bronisław Geremek and Daniel Cohn-Bendit on the use of open source software

Lapse date: 25.9.2008

DC\721370EN.doc
PE406.962v01-00
EN

0046/2008 Written declaration on the use of open source software

The European Parliament, – having regard to Rule 116 of its Rules of Procedure,

A. having regard to the growing disparities in access to information and communication technologies in the European Union, reflected in the establishment of a digital divide, a new cause of social disparity which further excludes an already vulnerable population,

B. whereas these new technologies have become an essential tool in areas as varied as employment, education, information etc.,

C. whereas European citizens have the inalienable right freely to access documents and information from the institutions which represent them,

D. whereas the use of open source software is one of the effective ways of reducing this digital divide and whereas this solution, established by some Member States in their administrations, delivers significant results,

1. Calls on the European Union to take the necessary measures to help finance public research on open source software;

2. Calls for Parliament to switch its whole computer network to this type of software;

3. Instructs its President to forward this declaration, together with the names of the signatories, to the parliaments of the Member States, the Council and the Commission, so that they may join forces on this measure.

Remember the goals of OOXML:

Goal No. 1

Keep the other numerous car-makers from advancing their technology […]

ODF in this case.

Goal No. 2

Lure as many developers into building useful apps (or the entire car) with Microsoft-technology.

You cannot implement OOXML without Microsoft dependencies, whether they are legal (FRAND patent license) or technical (WMV files in an OOXML document).

1. re: Microsoft CSS Vendor Extensions

Monday, September 15, 2008 8:26 PM by Scott

Interesting that so many people buy into the idea of vendor-specific code. It's enough of a mess with this vendor's fubar'ed browser now that it just makes more sense to ignore it altogether and let end user's see a message stating their browser is broken when visiting standard's compliant sites that don't work in it.

Where is the petition against Microsoft fonts extensions in CSS 2.1 so that I can sign it?

MSDN bloggers are important assets of the company to deliver the message:

…you know, we trust our people to represent our company - that is what they are paid to do. And if they don't wannna be here they wouldn't be here… Hey, if people need to be trained or understand better we can always do that.

As the Danish delegation once said in the Council

None of us are totally happy. If we were we would not be here.

Or as ex-ECMA's Jan van den Beld described standardisation:

…the answer is always the same: You are well paid, shut up.

We, the undersigned representatives of state IT organisations from Brazil, South Africa, Venezuela, Ecuador, Cuba and Paraguay, note with disappointment the press release from ISO/IEC/JTC-1 of 20 August regarding the appeals registered by the national bodies of Brazil, South Africa, India and Venezuela. Our national bodies, together with India, had independently raised a number of serious concerns about the process surrounding the fast track approval of DIS29500. That those concerns were not properly addressed in the form of a conciliation panel reflects poorly on the integrity of these international standards development institutions.

Whereas we do not intend to waste any more resources on lobbying our national bodies to pursue the appeals further, we feel it is important to make the following points clear:

1.The bending of the rules to facilitate the fast track processing of DIS29500 remains a significant concern to us. That the ISO TMB did not deem it necessary to properly explore the substance of the appeals must, of necessity, put confidence in those institutions ability to meet our national requirements into question.
2.The overlap of subject matter with the existing ISO/IEC26300 (Open Document Format) standard remains an area of concern. Many of our countries have made substantial commitments to the use of ISO/IEC26300, not least because it was published as an ISO standard in 2006.
3.The large scale adoption of a standard for office document formats is a long and expensive exercise, with multi-year projects being undertaken in each of our countries. Many of us have dedicated significant time and resources to this effort. For example, in Brazil, the process of translation of ISO/IEC26300 into Portuguese has taken over a year.

The issues which emerged over the past year have placed all of us at a difficult crossroads. Given the organisation's inability to follow its own rules we are no longer confident that ISO/IEC will be capable of transforming itself into the open and vendor-neutral standards setting organisation which is such an urgent requirement. What is now clear is that we will have to, albeit reluctantly, re-evaluate our assessment of ISO/IEC, particularly in its relevance to our various national government interoperability frameworks. Whereas in the past it has been assumed that an ISO/IEC standard should automatically be considered for use within government, clearly this position no longer stands.

Charles commented

The ISO of course, standing straight in the boots of stubbornness, will not pay any attention to that letter, will dismiss it as a something that has no importance, and Patrick Durusau will entertain us with one his tirade on those lousy teenagers. Patrick will ignore that “only” South Africa, Brazil, Cuba, Venezuela have appealed, as in case of a doubt, Microsoft and the pseudo-scientific arguments we had to bear for more than a year now about how much care the ISO has been taking on the standardization of OOXML will prevail over entire countries.
But who are we to interfere with the Masters of Scholastics of Geneva?

Which implies two questions:

• Does ISO receive declarations like these on a daily base?
• Does the quality of the text demonstrate it was drafted by lousy teenagers?

Charles notion of "angry teenagers" refers to a letter of Patrick Durusau we discussed before:

The objections were heard, considered and the vast majority of us simply disagree. The required majority has spoken, the appeals have been denied. Everyone should ignore further teenager type complaints and join SC 34 in working on both ISO 26300 and ISO 29500.

South America and South Africa have been aligned for quite some time on many occasions of international legislation and often vigorously oppose government agendas of the "North". What makes me as a European feel ashamed is that they take the freedom to speak in plain words while European and Northern American standard bodies fail to express the obvious. A reform of ISO would only be possible when all nations work jointly on that matter. Here it looks like the four nations actually consider to leave ISO and set up their own vendor-neutral standard organisation. I guess many standards consortia will try to gather the fortune and get these nations on board.

What is wrong with the comparison?

While the amount of documentation for Open XML is large, too large, we put emphasis on the size of the corpus as it is written in a documentation style we referred to as "rice pudding". It feeds you well, yes it does, but it's no "real meal". The efficiency of open xml documentation had no good carbon footprint and we exposed serious shortcomings where you would expect the interesting parts.

Generally speaking it was important to us that size does not matter. It does however matter when you expect competitors to implement the standard. The number of pages of the LHC documentation as opposed to the size of the Open XML corpus carries no relevant meaning.

What do they have in common?

The LHC is expected to let "strange things happen" which is the reason why some lunatics oppose the LHC and expect literally the end of the worlds. The public communication around the LHC stressed they wanted to recreate a near-big bang scenario which makes some persons suspicious. The experimental Open XML format had some strange idiosyncratic elements and weird things happened during the ISO process.
Benjamin coined the phrase to compare the Open XML process with physics and thought of the experiments you can make in a classic environment with materia in between the liquid, solid or gazoid phases: "When you increase the pressure strange things happen." The BRM for Open XML took also part in Geneva. Neither the LHC nor Open XML are the end of the world. In fact they are just the beginning of a New World. Our sincere hope is that as of Open XML it will be the unconditional surrender of the format and a landrush move towards open standards and open document format (ODF). The process towards more open and interoperable standards which go beyond ISO started at CERN where Tim Berners-Lee launched the web revolution with its html standard, an early example of a open standards.

…what MOICE does is it hijacks the file associations in the registry and redirects them to a process called ‘MOICE.EXE’. This process basically spawns the Office 2007 file format converter to up-convert the double-clicked Office 2003 document to the new Open XML file format. Oh and the converter runs in its own desktop with a super-locked down token (Dave is the freaking man!). Why run the converter in its own desktop with a super restricted token? Simple - what if the act of converting the file leads to an exploitable bug and / or code execution. This is effectively dropping the rights of the logged on user to *below* standard user levels in order to do the file conversion. Anyhoo - after the file is up-converted to the new Office 2007 file format - the theory is that the vulnerability will have been ‘wrung’ out (indeed the code name for this project was ‘Wringer’).”

So in other words Moice is an Open XML converter which converts to Open XML in a sandbox. As if it was dangerous to convert to Open XML! Explains the National Security Agency (NSA):

Malicious Office files often exploit vulnerabilities that exist in the parsing code used to open and save supported file types. Microsoft has responded to this type of threat by creating more robust parsers and by introducing new file formats in Office 2007. Further, the default file formats in Office 2007 (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx, etc.) are not allowed to contain embedded code or macros.

That is right, as Office 2007 files that contain macros use just another file extention: .docm (Word Microsoft Office Open XML Format Document with Macros Enabled), xlsm, pptm, etc.

Right or wrung theory?

What if the wringer is just a psychological tool to get users to adopt Open XML as a format? A kind of witch doctor trojan to infect your computer with the Open XML format conversion because you are afraid of viruses? Oh, they would never do that. I trust them. And trust is all about security. They know what's best for me and work hard to make my computer more secure and benefit my user experience with Open XML.

And what happens next. It would not surprise me to see security specialists publish open xml proof-of-concepts attacks. We are on the way to expose a new security open xml hell, 12 August:

In this month’s update for Excel we addressed … the first vulnerability to affect the new Open XML file format …. This is an information disclosure vulnerability that can arise when a user makes a data connection from Excel to a remote data source and checks a checkbox to have Excel NOT save the password used in that connection to the file. The checkbox had no affect when saving the file in the new Open XML (.XLSX) file format and the password was thus errantly saved to the file…

Or what about that one: Users want security, we have no security, we sold it out, we just have Open XML converters. ..use your imagination

In accordance with Recommendation 3 of the March 2007 SWG-Directives meeting, this version of the JTC 1 Directives is dedicated to Mr. Jan van den Beld for his many years of service to JTC 1, specifically his unwavering dedication to the development and evolution of the JTC 1 procedures.

Jan van den Beld works now for CompTIA, a well know Microsoft lobby proxy in Brussels and Washington, which claims to defend the interests of software SMEs.

SWG-Directives is the "special working group" that proposes changes to JTC1 Directives. They met at the end of July. In advance of the meeting many NB's submitted proposals for fixing Fast Track and BRM procedures, base on the obvious flaws in the process brought out by the processing of DIS 29500 OOXML. However, when they arrived at the meeting, the Chairman, Scott Jameson (from HP) ruled that these items must be removed from the agenda because the OOXML appeals were still in progress. Page 7, Adoption of the Agenda is where it gets interesting:

ISO/IEC JTC1
SWG-Directives
29-31 July 2008
Mont Tremblant, PQ, Canada
Location:
Hotel du Lac / Club Tremblant
121 Rue Cuttle
Ville du Mount Tremblant,
Quebec, Canada

1. Opening of Meeting (09:00 hrs)
2. Introduction of Participants
3. Adoption of Agenda

DOCUMENT: JTC 1 N 9178

The Chairman opened the discussion by noting the concern about postponing agenda items related to Fast Track and Ballot Resolution Meetings expressed by some delegates. The Chairman agreed that these topics are important, and acknowledged that National Bodies had done significant amounts of work on contributions related to these topics, but because of the pending appeals on ISO/IEC DIS 29500 (OOXML), discussion of these topics would be inappropriate. The Chairman informed attendees that as per the note on the draft agenda, items 9, and 15-21 would not be discussed. He then opened the floor for comments from attendees.

Mr. Barta of the ITTF expressed support for the decision of the Chairman, as the appeals address the Fast Track process, and discussing them would impede members of the IEC SMB and ISO TMB from doing their jobs.

The National Body of Japan requested a clarification about exactly would and would not be discussed; and expressed their concern about delaying these discussions. It was recommended that discussions on these topics occur, but making official decisions would not be made. The Chairman again stated that because of the open appeals, these topics would not be discussed.

The National Body of Germany suggested that as the appeals are related to the procedures in place when the Fast Track ballot of ISO/IEC DIS 29500 began, any discussions that might occur at this meeting are unrelated, because these are future procedures. The National Body of Germany further stated that the amount of contributions on this topic indicate that National Bodies are dissatisfied with the Fast Track process, and that the IEC SMB and ISO TMB should be made aware of this dissatisfaction.

The National Body of Canada supported the German position; stating that if the Fast Track process was not discussed, it would be interpreted as a show of support for the current process.

The National Body of Canada further noted that the SWG-Directives does not make decisions, but makes recommendations that are forwarded to JTC 1 for approval. It was suggested that any ballots on changes to the Fast Track or Ballot Resolution Meeting procedures be deferred until the close of the appeals.

The National Body of the United Kingdom stated that it recognized the difficulties and possible misinterpretations of any discussions that might occur, but wished to have a firm timeline for when such things could be discussed. The UK expressed concern about postponing discussions until the March 2009 meeting.

The Chairman explained the appeals process, and the timelines associated with it. The IEC SMB and ISO TMB will conclude their votes on whether or not to move forward with the appeals on 4 August 2008. Upon the close of this ballot, there will be a two-month window where appeals to this decision can be submitted. If no further appeals are received, the process will be concluded.

If the SMB and TMB agree to consider the appeals, conciliatory panels will need to be established. Should this occur, a final decision may not be reached for as long as a year.

The National Body of Japan suggested planning a meeting of the SWG-Directives to be held in conjunction with the October 2008 JTC 1 Plenary in Nara, Japan. The Chairman thanked Japan for this suggestion, and informed the group that a decision would be made on an additional meeting in Japan later in the agenda.

The Chairman asked attendees if there any objections to approving the agenda contained in JTC1 N 9178 with the deletion of agenda items 9, and 15-21. While no National Bodies objected to the adoption of the agenda, the National Bodies of Canada, Germany, Japan and the United Kingdom expressed their disappointment with the deletion of the items.

4. Chairman's Remarks
The Chairman informed attendees that a discussion of the draft JTC 1 Supplement, circulated to attendees via email in advance of the meeting, would take up the bulk of the meeting. He further informed attendees of his intention to circulate the text to all of JTC 1 after an initial review by the SWG-Directives.
The Chairman also suggested that the SWG-Directives might want to adopt a more ambitious schedule to ensure that the JTC 1 Supplement is published in conjunction with the 2010 edition of the ISO/IEC Directives.

4.1 Report of the June ISO/IEC Joint Directives Maintenance Team meeting

The Chairman reported on the 2 June 2008 meeting of the JDMT. He reported that some corrections of ambiguities for the clauses on the roles and responsibilities of Chairmen and Secretaries were made, but no other changes will affect JTC 1.
The Chairman also informed the group that Ad Hoc 25, which was established to review the length of ballot periods, reported to the JDMT and it was agreed that there will be no change to the length of the DIS ballot.

5. Review of Recommendations of March 2008 SWG-Directives meeting

DOCUMENT: JTC 1 N 8987

The Chairman noted that Recommendation 5 from the March 2008 meeting is not complete but that the JTC 1 Secretariat would work to complete it.

ACTION: See Recommendation 1.