The fallout from the ISO confirmation of Microsoft’s Office Open XML Specification as a standard, continues and is starting to lead to some serious consequences. The recent conference in South/Latin America focusing on free software, drew some 2000 registrants to the IT event, many of whom were top government officials. The outcome ( and declaration ) indicates, that due to the issues surrounding the process involved with the OOXML standards confirmation, it’s likely that governments will look to create alternative standards organisations that provide more relevance to modern-day organisations and governments.
The issues mentioned were:
1. The bending of the rules to facilitate the fast track processing of DIS29500 [OOXML] remains a significant concern to us. That the ISO TMB did not deem it necessary to properly explore the substance of the appeals must, of necessity, put confidence in those institutions ability to meet our national requirements into question.
2. The overlap of subject matter with the existing ISO/IEC26300 (Open Document Format) standard remains an area of concern. Many of our countries have made substantial commitments to the use of ISO/IEC26300, not least because it was published as an ISO standard in 2006.
3. The large scale adoption of a standard for office document formats is a long and expensive exercise, with multi-year projects being undertaken in each of our countries. Many of us have dedicated significant time and resources to this effort. For example, in Brazil, the process of translation of ISO/IEC26300 into Portuguese has taken over a year.
And, the statement includes:
The issues which emerged over the past year have placed all of us at a difficult crossroads. Given the organisation’s inability to follow its own rules we are no longer confident that ISO/IEC will be capable of transforming itself into the open and vendor-neutral standards setting organisation which is such an urgent requirement. What is now clear is that we will have to, albeit reluctantly, re-evaluate our assessment of ISO/IEC, particularly in its relevance to our various national government interoperability frameworks.
So, some very strong words in the declaration. I can certainly see other countries ( including India, Singapore and other Asian countries ) joining new organisations that are not vendor-influenced ( or controlled ). When you take into consideration the non-western countries’ ( Africa, Europe to a degree and Asia ) increased use of open source software, and this new development, there is an obvious ground shift in a move away from the American commercial software vendors and Americanised standards institutions. The west only have themselves to blame. Told you so?