Open warfare
A row is brewing over an effort by Microsoft to have a new file format it helped create accepted as an international standard. A local standards subcommittee has recommended that a proposal to fast-track adoption of the format be rejected.
Microsoft looks set to face an uphill battle in convincing the SA Bureau of Standards (SABS) not to use a vote later this year to try to block the company’s application to have Ecma Open XML published as quickly as possible as a standard by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).
Two weeks ago, a local ISO subcommittee recommended to its parent ISO committee, also local, that it advise the SABS to vote against a proposal that the ratification of Open XML be fast-tracked through the ISO. In a posting to open-source news website Tectonic, subcommittee chairman Barry Dwolatzky said: “The feeling of the committee members was that [Open XML] was not acceptable in its current format as a good and usable standard. The door was certainly left open, however, to recommend the acceptance of a revised and better-drafted version of the document as an ISO standard in the future.”
Thirteen subcommittee members voted against the Microsoft application; four voted in favour. The worldwide ISO vote is scheduled for September 2; two-thirds of ISO member states have to vote in favour of the proposed standard before it can be fast tracked to ratification.
The file format, used in Microsoft’s widely used Office suite, has already been approved as a standard by Ecma International. Microsoft hopes that ISO ratification will give the format greater credibility as an international standard for storing electronic documents.
There’s just one problem: the ISO has already approved an open standard for electronic documents — the OpenDocument format, or ODF, which has its roots in the open source community. ODF is used by open source office suites such as Microsoft Office rivals OpenOffice.org and KOffice.
Open-source advocates on the local ISO subcommittee that considered Open XML questioned why two standards were necessary. Subcommittee member Dwayne Bailey, an open-source advocate, says the “worst thing we could do would be to ratify two standards that do the same thing”. Would companies and governments be forced to publish all their documents in both formats, he asks. “Will we have to do that just because someone [Microsoft] can’t play nice in the playground of life?”
But Microsoft SA platform strategy manager Paulo Ferreira says Open XML and ODF cater to different market needs. He says the subcommittee had a “clear anti-Microsoft bias” and says subcommittee members spent time arguing the merits of ODF, which was not their mandate.
“We have to question if they were there to debate the merits of Ecma Open XML or whether they were there to ensure Open XML doesn’t receive accreditation in the ISO,” he says. “When the vote took place, there was an overwhelming bias from the opposition against Microsoft, from the open-source community and from IBM”
Distrust of Microsoft runs deep. The company has long used proprietary file formats in its Office suite and refused to share them with others. This means that rival application developers have to reverse-engineer the Microsoft formats to open documents saved in applications such as Word and Excel.
Microsoft says its decision to create an open document format is the result of pressure from its customers who want their heterogeneous systems to communicate with each other more easily. But a more likely explanation is that the company is worried that its customers, especially governments, will reject its proprietary file formats in favour of ODF, in the process ditching Microsoft Office for rival products.
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