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September 3, 2008

A decision yesterday to dismiss several appeals against the controversial fast-track approval of a Microsoft document format has provoked six country members of the global standards-setting body ISO (The International Standards Organization) to seriously question its very own relevance, mandate and integrity in the IT industry as a whole.

Overall, a rather large minority of national standards bodies had voted against approving the Microsoft format, which is an alternative to the open source OpenDocument Format that has been a published ISO standard for the past two years already.

To this date, countries with rapidly-growing IT markets such as Brazil, Venezuela, South Africa and even India have all appealed against the ISO's stamp of approval for Microsoft Office Open XML (OOXML), an endorsement likely to help the Redmond giant win more public-sector contracts.

But the ISO, together with the International Electrotechnical Commission has now decided that those appeals were not worth pursuing, meaning OOXML will soon become an official ISO standard, provided no new appeals are lodged.

This could explain why several southern countries have met over the weekend in an effort to prevent the ISO from ruling in Microsoft's favor.

Some observers think it may already be too late for those countries. Others disagree.

"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," they wrote on the South African representative's site.

For its part, Microsoft already lost a first vote on OOXML, which is strongly opposed by advocates of open source software and the Linux community as a whole. However, it did win a vote after a week-long ballot resolution meeting to discuss the 6,000-page ISO specifications.

"The bending of the rules to facilitate the fast-track process remains a significant concern to us," they said, referring to a process many parties had complained was too fast and not transparent enough for such a complex standard.

By definition, the ISO is a nonprofit, nongovernmental body made up of the national standards of 157 countries.

The ISO sprang up in the 1940s in response to strong demand for standard specifications for materials needed to rebuild the infrastructure of war-shattered countries.

Many public bodies prefer to keep documents in formats whose specifications are owned by ISO, to avoid the risk that they will be unable to access their own archives, or have to pay to do so in the future.

Source: Consegi.

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