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September 2, 2008

Over this long Labor Day weekend, many state IT organisation representatives from Brazil, Venezuela, Ecuador, Cuba, Paraguay and even some countries in South Africa have signed a declaration expressing their strong dissatisfaction with the ISO (International Standards Organisation). And now India is also seriously considering the same.

Overall, the participating countries signed the declaration at the "Consegi" conference in Brazil in response to news that the ISO/IEC had rejected the appeals from South Africa, Brazil and Venezuela and India to the ISO process to adopt Microsoft’s OOXML format as an international standard.

On June 10, 2008 Brazil, India, South Africa and Venezuela have all complained that there wasn't enough time given to discuss improvements to the open document format.

In the introduction to the declaration the six nations wrote: “our national bodies, together with India, had independently raised a number of serious concerns about the process surrounding the fast track approval of DIS-29500. 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, and we stand united in getting our complaints heard and dealt with accordingly.”

The signatories also raise the issue of the overlap between the existing OpenDocument Format ISO standard and Microsoft’s OOXML format. “Many of our countries have made substantial commitments to the use of ISO/IEC26300 (ODF), not least because it was published as an ISO standard more than two years ago.

“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,” the declaration says.

The declaration also added that the “bending of the rules to facilitate the fast track processing of DIS-29500 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.”

The declaration then concludes by saying that “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 to the Linux community and to the open source development of significant projects in our respective coutries.

“What is now clear is that we will have to, albeit reluctantly, strongly re-evaluate our assessment of ISO/IEC, particularly as it pertains to 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 today, and needs to be addressed rapidly.”

Source: Consegi.

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