(originally published in Portuguese at http://blog.softwarelivre.sapo.pt/2007/12/12/ooxml-got-the-facts-straight/ , this is my own translation so if you spot errors please tell me so it can be corrected, or correct them if you have the necessary permissions, thanks in advance, Rui)
The company which is president of the Technical Commission for standardization of documents godfathered by Instituto de Informática and Instituto Portugues da Qualidade (NB) doesn't recognize the accusation of conflict of interest on evaluation of OOXML, claiming it needs more facts.
The entities in charge do nothing, allowing for this situation to continue.
The conflict of interest is evident, but if it wasn't enough, and because what's at stake here are specifications, we could check out what history has to tell about Microsoft's position in this regard. In fact, it is valuable to recall the historical record of Microsoft with relation to standardization, in order to reflect on whether what's happening right now is, once again, history repeating itself.
The summary that follows is totally based on publicly accessible documents, from which are included cases that went on court.
Fact 1: Bill Gates wanted to subvert ACPI so it would only work well with Windows, as it's documented on proof 3020 of “Comes vs Microsoft”:
«Maybe we could define the APIs so that they work well with NT and not the others even if they are open. Or maybe we could patent something related to this.» - William Henry Gates III, 1999
ACPI is a specification of power management for laptops and deskopts. Only recently it started to work well in operating systems that are not Windows, although no relation was ever proved between both facts yet.
Fact 2: Microsoft tried to sabotage the Java programming language, introducing in the market a product based on Java but with dependencies on its Windows platform.
«Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let’s move on and steal the Java language.» - Prashant Sridharan, MS Visual J++ Product Manager, 1997
After being forced by court to stop corrupting Java, Microsoft created a new programming environment so called “.NET”, which uses as main programming language C#, designed to be similar to Java, aiming to attract programmers who wrote in Java.
This environment is mono-platform because it has several essential components which are “optional”. Just like OOXML.
Fact 3: Microsoft introduced proprietary extensions in HTML and aggressively induced its partners to use such extensions in order to monopolise internet browsing software (item 322, for instance):
«The first obligation that the ICPs undertook was to distribute Internet Explorer and no “Other Browser” in connection with any custom Web browsing software or CD-ROM content that they might offer» - US District Court of Columbia, 1999
The consequence of this actions is that Microsoft did in fact get the monopoly on web browsing with Internet Explorer, which has been holding on up until now. The result is that in this mono-platform scene, pages that have unstandard HTML proliferate, and it's impossible to interpret it the same way in different browsers.
Fact 4: Microsoft tries to exclude Free Softwares potential of competitiveness by making protocols proprietary (pg. 24 of PDF, 22 of the page numbering).
«The two documents in here from Vinod am the ones I want the board to see.» - William Gates III, 1999, about a document written by Vinod
«OSS projects have been able to gain a foothold in many server applications because of the wide utility of highly commoditized simple protocols. By extending these protocols and developing new ones, we can deny OSS projects entry into the market.» - Vinod Vallopillil, ex-MS Engineer, 1999
In fact, the manipulation of protocols via non-standard implementations has been observed in Kerberos and LDAP, as used in Microsoft Active Directory. Other examples are Exchange Server and the current Microsoft Office document formats, which not only are secret in their current versions, on the new version Microsoft tries to make a standard of, through ECMA, at ISO are filled with components that are impossible to implement, taking in account the information in the specification.
At the same time, they say both that these components exist because big and important users like USA's Library of Congress demand it, and that it's okay to not implement them because they are “optional” (except for all users who depend on them).
Fact 5: Microsoft was considered guilty of abusing its monopoly restricting interoperability information.
«The first type of conduct found to constitute an abuse consisted in Microsoft’s refusal to supply its competitors with interoperability information and to authorize them to use that information to develop and distribute products competing with its own products» - EC First Instance Court, 2007
Is there a better way to keep the monopoly over document formats, whilst seemingly giving information to competitors, than badly documenting it
and make it a standard?
Fact 6: Microsoft didn't want to participate in ODF development (just like in Internet access, they understood the importance of standards late in the game) and only because of that it didn't oppose, at the time, its adoption as an ISO standard:
«We [Microsoft] are OASIS members but since we didn’t have an interest in ODF we didn’t participate in its development. Since we didn’t have an interest, that also meant we didn’t oppose it in ISO» - Brian Jones , MS Office Program Manager, 2007
Microsoft repeats several times in public that it wasn't taken in account during ODF standardization, being actually refuted on last 7th & 8th of November at the Free Software in Public Administration event by and ODF Alliance representative when they proferred this “innocent” statement.
