Microsoft's Philanderings & Contradictions

PJ at Groklaw airs out the reasons ISO voters are going to need to consider carefully this month their votes for fast-tracking the not-open Microsoft Office Open XML formats.

She quotes our colleague, Marbux...

JTC-1's role includes ensuring that such vendor favoritism does not creep into the preparation of international open standards. Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade,supra, section 2.2 ("[m]embers shall ensure that technical regulations are not prepared, adopted or applied with a view to or with the effect of creating unnecessary obstacles to international trade"); ISO/IEC JTC-1 Directives, section 11.1.2 (members may may appeal JTC-1 action or inaction that is "[n]ot in the best interests of international trade and commerce"). A single vendor's development requirements do not necessarily create a market requirement for a duplicative standard, particularly when a proposed standard would have "the effect of" granting a single vendor a monopoly in the full-fidelity conversion of billions of legacy files to and from the supposedly open EOOXML.

There is a lot substance here, and very little common sense to support ratification of the Microsoft Office Open XML formats at ISO.

Pamela Jones | "Searching for Openness in Microsoft Office Open XML and Finding Contradictions" (18 Jan 2007)

Comments

[Stephane Rodriguez]

If you are looking for a major show stopper, aside the lack of full fidelity that I posted about as a comment in one of your previous posts, just password-protect your document.

Big surprise. The resulting file is not even a ZIP file.

And yes, you've guessed it : 1) it's an OLE document 2) the mechanism to generate it and read it is not documented at all.