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Antonis Christofides posted a report with clarifications. In my opinion it is one of the best reports from the BRM. After a five days negotiation round you would not expect thoughtful writings.
I have been one of the two Greek delegates to the OOXML Ballot Resolution Meeting (BRM). Lots of things have already been written about the meeting. I will not repeat them here, but will only make a few clarifications on things that I think are not well understood.
Mr. Christofides reports he also drafted a Greek solution for the date problem (he thinks its much cleaner than the adopted version) but:
When I discussed my proposal with Brian Jones [Microsoft/ECMA] on Thursday morning, he pointed out that it would be difficult for Ecma to accept it[??], because they did not have the time to verify that it actually works in all cases. Now this was a very valid concern. My proposal was more than 30 pages. Even if it were well thought and error free, Ecma had no way of knowing that. Therefore, the BRM was essentially confined to making changes that only scratched the surface of the problems.
Apparently the date problem could not be optimally resolved and ECMA was able to exploit its advantage of privileged access/proposal. A Greek national body alternative resolutions for a problem could not be adopted by the BRM for the reason Antonis explains us. It is a remarkable irritation that a private party as ECMA International got an official and powerful role in the ISO BRM (but no press, no observers, no live broadcasting, participants silenced) and attempted to pull the strings. I am confident future ISO reforms will take the power from ECMA back to the NB - the legitimated stakeholder that are supposed to take the decisions at the BRM.
BRM participant Rob Weir (IBM) discusses the changes applied and supports an old suggestion of this campaign:
Does OOXML tell you how to translate a binary document into OOXML? No. Does it tell you how to map the features of legacy documents in OOXML? No. Does it give an implementor any guidance whatsoever on how to "represent faithfully" legacy documents? No. So it is both odd and unsatisfactory that primary goal of the OOXML standard is so tenuously supported by its text. …Microsoft should simply publish this mapping. Without such a mapping, conversions will be inconsistent, interoperability will suffer and a primary goal of the standard will not be met.
Another classic follower of the debate: Groklaw conducts an interview with Andy Updegrove who runs the Consortium Info Blog. Although he was no participant of the BRM he is quoted by many. Mr. Updegrove was one of the first who gave some BRM result insights that were disputed by the convenor and others.
Consortium Info: Showdown in Geneva: Most OOXML Dispositions Fail to Achieve Majority Approval at BRM
We find a very heavy debate in his comments section and he updates his report accordingly.
Contributor "overshot" shots at Brian Jones who was part of the ECMA team at the BRM.
Seconding Brian Jones, the BRM made great progress. Once the editorial stuff was out of the way the BRM worked through 20 of approximately 900 issues this week. It seems as though the only thing standing in the way of a quality specification is a bit more time to work out the remaining issues. A back-of-the-envelope calculation tells me that another 45 weeks should do it for the fast-track process.
Steve Ballmer apparently talked in his Cebit 2008 presentation about OOXML - as the reference is not part of the published speech, it was most likely an answer to a journalist question:
Ballmer also cited the company's Office Open XML (OOXML) file format, now under consideration to become an international standard by the International Organization for Standardization, as another example of how the company has opened up.
Rick Jelliffe, the "independent" expert sent by Standards Australia removed his blog post. His controversial teaching why the BRM was only able to cast an eye on a small part of the specification: the other BRM delegates were slow and incompetent.
It is typical that most delegates at these kind of thing are not up to speed on everything (because you want deep experts at these things, more than generalists), what is atypical is the large number of non-technical delegates and that a few delegates seemed surprised that their delegations would have to figure out a position on each issue by the end of the week (which could be “abstain - we have no position”.) It is not as if they hadn’t been told!
and he continues to explain why getting governments(!?) involved is beneficial to the standard. His subtile suggestion is to approve the standard or Microsoft could walk away and leave no role to governments for a maintenance role.
There are a lot of those, and they will have to go to maintenance, which really is the big issue: will MS continue these baby steps to openness or will they go soggy once out of the spotlight, which is not unprecedented by other standards stakeholder? Even after the final vote (assuming an acceptance vote, as seems likely) governments will need to keep the pressure on Ecma to continue working with SC34 and to get these outstanding issues addressed ASAP; it is not the case that unaddressed issues need to disappear down a black hole, but SC34’s only power comes from having strong government and user backing to give this maintenance the steroids it needs: this not only means monstering MS to continue through maintenance, but also to provide adequate resources: staffing, delegates, and long-term support for participation at standards meetings. The government needs to be asking “What support are we giving to developing and encouraging our technical experts?” otherwise they are talking through their hats about standards. There is no such thing as an instant expert.
Let me suggest that Rick Jelliffe found his call for state aid inappropriate and removed his blog post for this reason. Or was it because he attacked members of his national committee (he was supposed to represent as a national delegate) and his fellow international colleagues:
That is not to say that the final text will be acceptable to our National Body, Standards Australia: there are people for whom no amount of improvement in the text will make OOXML an acceptable subject for an ISO standard, there have been so many changes the result needs a good looking over. And there are people who are concerned the MS OSP is unsound (IP was not an issue for the BRM to discuss.) And again it is not to say that even when an issue was addressed, we got our preferred position or that the changes will be completely acceptable in every case: other pesky nations got in the way.
"Pesky" nations? I don't know if Malaysia was one of them but we have a press release from the Malaysian national body on the BRM outsome.
"Malaysia decided to vote 'Disapprove' to these undiscussed issues," Fadilah elaborated, "The limitation of the BRM process clearly showed that such a task of approving this draft standard does not fit in the Fast Track process employed by Ecma International. Malaysia and other country delegations worked very hard which extended into evenings after the BRM sessions. All the technical experts from diverse backgrounds, including from Microsoft, the original proposer of the Draft, put their heads together to fix the specification. Malaysia approved the counter proposals by many National Bodies which were discussed during the BRM. Unfortunately there were just far too many to fix within the given time."
Time contraints were a concern for Malaysia:
"Malaysia had submitted 23 comments and more than 70% of them were not addressed satisfactorily by Ecma's proposed dispositions. We intended to resolve these technical issues at the BRM, but we could only raise 2 concerns due to the time constraints imposed," Fadilah said.
