Jordan Standards body lobbying on behalf of Microsoft?

Summary:

The corruption train has reached a summit with the Jordan Institution for Standards and Metrology (JISM) lobbying on behalf of Microsoft. They have sent an email to all ISO P-members asking them to urgently support OOXML, with some information coming directly from Microsoft. A member of the Lithuanian technical committee is nevertheless raising doubt on the competence of the Jordan experts. Jordan does not has a technical committee, only an industry organisation as advisor where Microsoft is a member.

Jordan Standards Body lobbying on behalf of Microsoft?

Anonymous (87.65.197.x) 18 Aug 2007 13:46

The corruption train has reached a summit with the Jordan Institution for Standards and Metrology (JISM) lobbying on behalf of Microsoft. They have sent an email to all ISO P-members asking them to urgently support OOXML, with some information coming directly from Microsoft with their "open source supports ooxml". A member of the Lithuanian technical committee is nevertheless raising doubt on the competence of the Jordan experts. Jordan does not has a technical committee, only an industry organisation as advisor where Microsoft is a member.

The following email (published on the INCITS website) has been sent to all ISO P-members this week:

Sent: Tuesday, August 14, 2007 10:24 AM

Dear P-Members of ISO/IEC JTC1,

Reference to the submission of the ISO/DIS 29500 "Information technology — Office Open XML file formats" under the Fast Track Procedure, Kindly note that Jordan represented by the Information Technology Association of Jordan (INTAJ) and its members in addition to other large national IT companies greatly support the publication of the ECMA International's Open XML Standard as ISO/IEC Standard (as shown in attachment 1). This resolution has been reached after studying ISO/DIS 29500 carefully and ensuring that such standard doesn't represent any contradiction with other ISO/IEC standards such as the Open Documents Format (ODF).

Actually INTAJ is an ICT industry-support association that embraces Jordan's ICT businesses, with a mission to promote their advancement on a local and International level, and enhance their capacity and performance. This goes in parallel with improving the dynamics of Jordan's ICT market and catalyzing all Jordan's ICT related activities.

In light of this issue, let us also emphasize the importance of this vote as Open XML represents an important advance in document standards that offers benefits to technology users, IT industry, consumers, business and government worldwide. Its publication benefits organizations that intend to implement applications capable of using the format, commercial and governmental entities that procure such software, and educators or authors who teach the format. Ultimately, all users enjoy the benefits of an XML standard for their documents, including stability, preservation, interoperability, and ongoing evolution. Consequently, the approval of ECMA International's Open XML Standard as ISO/IEC Standard will enhance marketplace adoption, broaden choice, and is fully consistent with what has been done in other areas of technology (e.g., image formats, such as JPEG, TIFF; digital video formats, such as MPEG-2 and H.264; and document formats, such as HTML, ODF, and PDF/A), where overlapping standards (including multiple ISO/IEC standards) that address distinct user needs have been approved and have substantially benefited customers.

It is well known that Open XML is a new open standard document file format that is being used by many vendors and users, including open source developers (as shown in attachment 2) for the reason that the Open XML Formats specification is optimized for the level of precision and detail required to carry forward billions of existing files, including a complete specification for spreadsheet. The Open XML Formats also offer the unique capability of hosting custom-defined data languages within the document format. This capability is a key innovation for developers seeking to incorporate real-time business information into their documents, or those who seek to “tag” documents with their own categorization system.

The Open XML format standardization effort represent a very focused effort to write down in a standardized way the sum of information used in the already proven domain of existing binary formats while preparing for future enhancements and evolution.

Although Open XML and ODF are both intended to describe office documents, each is designed to satisfy different user requirements. Open XML has been designed to be capable of faithfully representing the majority of existing office documents in form and functionality. It is designed to replace existing binary document formats with easily accessible, open formats to meet a wide variety of user needs, formats which capture identical information yet are extensively documented, and can be implemented on a wide variety of operating systems and devices. Meeting this objective, while also satisfying many other goals, imposes stringent requirements on the overall design and architecture of the format. Among the other goals for Open XML are:

• Open and XML-conformant independence from proprietary formats and features
• Internationalization capabilities
• Compact file size (compared to the binary formats)
• Modularity
• Integration with business data
• Extensibility mechanisms
• Versioning capabilities that allow for forward compatibility
• Provision of accessibility features

Further, standardizing the format specification and maintaining it over time ensure that multiple parties can safely rely on it, confident that further evolution will enjoy the checks and balances afforded by an open standards process. The compelling need exists for an open document-format standard that is capable of preserving the billions of documents that have been created in the preexisting binary formats, and the billions that continue to be created each year. Technological advances in hardware, networking, and a standards-based software infrastructure make it possible. The explosive diversification in market demand – including significant existing investments in mission critical business systems – makes it essential.

As a result, Jordan kindly urges all the P-members of ISO/IEC JTC1 to support strongly the approval of the ECMA International's Open XML Standard as ISO/IEC Standard as Open XML meets user requirements that are distinct from those of ODF and of significant material importance to corporations and government organizations worldwide.

Thank you for your support for Open XML Standard.

Best Regards

Nesreen Al-Khammash

Standardization Department
Jordan Institution for Standards and Metrology
Telephone: [phone]-Ext. 304
Fax: [phone]
email: oj.vog.msij|hsammahkn#oj.vog.msij|hsammahkn

Last edited on 18 Aug 2007 13:50 by zoobab Show more

Re: Jordan Standards Body lobbying on behalf of Microsoft?

stegu 18 Aug 2007 16:16

Hmm. Let's take this seriously for a moment and examine their claims regarding supposedly unique features of OOXML:

• Open and XML-conformant independence from proprietary formats and features

The openness of OOXML has been disputed, and the issue is not resolved. There are quite a few features in the OOXML markup which are not XML-conformant, and there are lots of references to proprietary data structures in the specification, without any disclosure of their format. ODF does significantly better in this respect.

• Internationalization capabilities

As has been pointed out by numerous reviewers, there are definitely problems with OOXML being Western-oriented, even US-centric, in many aspects. ODF does a better job with this.

• Compact file size (compared to the binary formats)

Because it is XML compressed as ZIP, yes, it's compact. So is ODF. OOXML and ODF are compressed XML formats. Comparing the size of a compressed XML format to an uncompressed binary format is pointless. ODF is just as compact as OOXML.

• Modularity

Define "modularity". The OOXML specification is a 6000 pages chunk of text with no details on what would constitute a reasonable partial implementation. There is a significant and sometimes opaque interdependence between sections, and there are mostly no alternative implementations available for any of the namespaces. ODF, on the other hand, references other standards where appropriate, and can be implemented in a modular manner using pieces of code from various places. I see no obvious definition of "modularity" that would put OOXML in favor of ODF, but this claim is so vague that I would like to see a clarification.

• Integration with business data

Proper XML integrates well with other data. It's the very purpose of XML. ODF can rightfully be said to integrate just as easily with business data, or any other data for that matter. The fact that MS Office can incorporate references to Windows-specific control objects and data sources into its documents is not a feature of the file format, it is a feature of MS Office as an implementation. If anything, OOXML as a data format integrates less easily with other formats because of its strange, opaque and often nonstandard XML encoding. Yes, OOXML files handled by MS Office integrate well with business data closely tied to other Windows (even Microsoft) applications, but once again, that's not a feature of the file format. If MS Office were to use its own cleanly extended version of ODF, such platform-specific integration would be just as good as with OOXML.

• Extensibility mechanisms

Extensibility is built into XML. It's an acronym for "eXtensible Markup Language". DOF is also XML. The extensibility mechanisms provided within the ODF schemas can be argued to be better than those of OOXML, because they are designed to support any application. OOXML is extensible mainly to support future versions of MS Office on Windows.

• Versioning capabilities that allow for forward compatibility

This is just silly. Any useful modern file format has versioning, including ODF.

• Provision of accessibility features

As has been shown by an independent study from the University of Toronto, accessibility was not a design goal of OOXML, as it fails to meet even some very basic accessibility requirements. ODF in its current version has good accessibility features, and was designed in collaboration with accessibility experts. OOXML, apparently, was not.

None of these eight claims make any sense to me. What kind of "experts" wrote this?

Re: Jordan Standards Body lobbying on behalf of Microsoft?

stegu 18 Aug 2007 17:11

I thought some more about this, and the problem I see with letters such as this is that ISO is presented with an ultimatum: either have the already existing implementation of OOXML approved as an ISO standard, or leave us poor users without an option to get standardized XML data in and out of MS Office. Those are not the options. OOXML is already an ECMA standard. People are free to implement it as much as they like, and MS Office 2007 will still use it regardless of what ISO does. Thus, the "user requirements" are rather to be interpreted as "vendor requirements" from Microsoft and its partners. Microsoft of course would prefer to take the easy way out and have their own XML data format approved as a standard to be able to say "we support an ISO standard, in fact we are the standard" to governments and others who require support for a formal open standard document format approved by ISO. The problem is that ISO should have higher standards (pun intended) than ECMA appears to have. OOXML is simply not fit to become an ISO standard in its current form.

Using documented XML data in MS Office is a very nice idea, and OOXML as an ECMA standard is certainly a start. However, for document interchange and archiving purposes it would be highly desirable to use well documented and good XML data with MS Office. One alternative for that purpose is to use ODF, which is possible, even according to Microsoft. The other option would be a cleaned-up and corrected version of OOXML with a documentation that makes sense and does not fall apart when you look too closely at it. OOXML as described by ECMA-376 is a broken standard, and it needs to be fixed. Bullying it through ISO will not make it any better or more useful.

All political and business issues aside, Microsoft's technical design of OOXML has been evaluated by a large number of independent experts and found lacking on several important accounts. Are they going to face up to the problem and do something to thoroughly improve the OOXML specification, or are they going to keep whining about it and use bribes, threats and misinformation to try and get their standard approved despite its obvious lack of technical merit?

If they at least proved their good intentions by handling this in a graceful and correct manner, I would not have nearly as much of a problem with it. OOXML is a mess, but that can be fixed. However, given their current course of action, I must strongly question their motives.

Re: Jordan Standards Body lobbying on behalf of Microsoft?

podmokle 21 Aug 2007 15:32

"Using documented XML data in MS Office is a very nice idea, and OOXML as an ECMA standard is certainly a start. However, for document interchange and archiving purposes it would be highly desirable to use well documented and good XML data with MS Office. One alternative for that purpose is to use ODF, which is possible, even according to Microsoft. The other option would be a cleaned-up and corrected version of OOXML with a documentation that makes sense and does not fall apart when you look too closely at it. OOXML as described by ECMA-376 is a broken standard, and it needs to be fixed. Bullying it through ISO will not make it any better or more useful."

Microsoft is under antitrust pressure and has to lay open its format. It would be a shame if they could show up and present an ISO approval.

I think that the constructive approach is that all issues with ooxml have to get addressed. An essential condition is that the standard bodies submit comments. Without negotiations and a credible treat of force nothing would be changed. Same applies for the patent conditions. Here are clarifications needed.

Re: Jordan Standards Body lobbying on behalf of Microsoft?

Anonymous (62.58.36.x) 22 Aug 2007 14:13

[quoteThe openness of OOXML has been disputed, and the issue is not resolved[/quote]

Strangly enough only by organisation with an interest in ODF. organisation that are interested in using the format have no reservations whatsoever.
Also it seems that all those competitors spening tons of money on this campaign and al those organisations have not found a single legal expoert on licensing and/or patentlaw that actually states Office Open XML isn't open.

If a group of big companies and a whole lot of FOSS organisations have been claiming licensing of OOXML isn't open for a year or more then it seems very strange that this isn't substatiated by any legal document or analysis by an actual lawfirm or even by a wel known legal expert on licensing an/or patent law.
The only analysis come from groclaw and their knowledge on the subject of software patents looking at grokdoc pages is beyond weak.

Re: Jordan Standards Body lobbying on behalf of Microsoft?

stegu 23 Aug 2007 18:38

I agree in part, Pamela Jones and her collaborators are certainly not experts on
everything, and they never claim to provide formal legal counseling. I agree that a
proper legal analysis is required to resolve this issue, and I am sorry to see that it
has not yet been done. Fact remains, the issue is not resolved and the openness
has been disputed, while the openness of ODF and the validity of the accompanying
patent promise from Sun have not been disputed.

The wording has changed subtly between the "promise" from Sun and the one from
Microsoft. Some of those changes, when taken literally, make the statements devoid
of any actual meaning. While this might be unintentional, is is a cause for concern.
Surely Microsoft must have very good lawyers to write their legal texts?

I am not saying OOXML is definitely not open, I am just saying that a fairly large
amount of people are saying it might not be. This is a reason to worry, and it
should be addressed. The only party currently claiming that OOXML is open is
Microsoft. Many others are questioning this, and for the Jordan group to bluntly
state that "OOXML is open" is a clear sign of where their arguments originated.

"OOXML is open" is currently to be taken as an opinion, not a fact, and it is an
opinion not firmly held by many others than Microsoft. Stating "OOXML is not open"
is currently also an opinion, not a fact, even though it is an opinion that seems
a lot more wide-spread. We simply need more time and legal counseling in this matter.