Front-page: Limited choice at German DIN

Andrew Updegrove reports from the DIN vote citing an anonymous source:

Germany is voting "YES" on DIS 29500 at ISO. The relevant committee was given by DIN only the choice between "YES" and "ABSTAIN" on DIS 29500, since changing from "YES with comments" in September 2007 to "NO" in March 2008 was deemed impossible. Everyone could vote "yes", "abstain" or "no" on the question whether Germany should vote "YES" or "ABSTAIN" on DIS 29500.

Alex Brown made clear in his FAQ that a prior vote in September does not prejudice the decision in march in any way and national bodies as DIN have the choice between all options including switching from approval to disapproval. I am shocked that the responsible committee was restricted to exercise its voting rights. Despite of the fact that the DIN committee is totally stuffed and disapproval therefore impossible, I find it unbearable that the DIN prejudices the choice of the committee.

But the story goes on:

8 votes were in favour of "YES", 6 were in favour of "ABSTAIN", some pointing out that they would have preferred to vote an outright "NO". 4 voted "abstain to the DIN vote", i.e. on the vote between "YES" and "ABSTAIN" to ISO. 2 of the 4 had initially voted for a German "ABSTAIN", but under pressure changed within 48 hours their vote from a German "ABSTAIN" to "abstain to the DIN vote"; one of the 4 was compelled by instruction to vote "abstain to the DIN vote", even though he wanted to vote at least "ABSTAIN". That means: without very strong pressure from Microsoft Germany would have voted "ABSTAIN", with 9 to 8.

Isn't that unbelievable! I personally wonder why an American company gets a voice in a German committee at all. How can it be that the same company votes in all committees worldwide, not only via business partners but by their local sales departments? It is a great shame for me that DIN permits this kind of hijacking of our national interest. Whoever designed the ISO system was not prepared for multinational corporations that refuse to leave the adoption of a standard to arguments based on its technical merits and maturity.

Interesting. If this keeps going and another P-country or two gets subverted by last minute MS tactics, they might just barely be able to squeeze their OOXML camel through the eye of the needle: 2/3 majority of voting P-members and <25% negative votes. The fact that this DIS vote is so close tells a story in itself, and it's not a happy one. A fast track vote should be a clear-cut rubber stamp procedure, but this is very far from it.

Of course, if the vote passes, MS still has a lot of work to do to implement the actual ISO standard in MS Office. Right now there are a lot of things they do wrong, like using "transitional" OOXML (as defined by the new DIS29500 text) to encode newly created files.

NoOOXML

NO to MS OOXML