April 1, 2008
Microsoft’s battle over standards: The empire strikes back
The betting among those who have been tracking Microsoft’s pursuit of international standards recognition for its Open Office XML formats (the voting by national standards bodies closed at the weekend) is that the software company will emerge victorious.
If correct, this is a significant breakthrough for Microsoft. To have lost would have handed a huge victory to the IBM-backed Open Document Format. The blessing of the ISO, on the other hand, would serve to further cement the de-facto standard that already exists around Office.
The official word from the ISO is not due until Wednesday, but Websites that have been trying to piece together the picture from individual national announcements point to what seems a big swing towards Microsoft among those countries that objected to OOXML as a standard when this came up for a vote last September. The Openmalaysia blog claims seven countries that had objected before have now either decided to support Microsoft or abstain - though the sourcing of much of this is far from clear (the UK’s decision to throw its weight behind Microsoft is attributed to open source standards lawyer Andy Updegrove.)
Until the formal count is in it would be rash to predict that this saga is over. But even hard-line opponents like the Groklaw blog now seem to have conceded Microsoft’s victory and have been left muttering about possible appeals against the way the ISO decision was reached.
This is a fair and balanced post – in contrast to the many posts on ISO’s (now confirmed) ratification of Open XML which are outright hostile towards toward the format and anybody daring to support its standardization (and that’s even though, as you point out, Open XML is already the de facto standard anyway).
Unfortunately, ever since ISO officially confirmed ratification of Open XML on Wednesday, IBM, Groklaw and other IBM friends have engaged in a campaign of character assassination, asserting that everybody supporting Open XML must have taken bribes from Microsoft.
Open XML’s opponents have gone so far, in fact, that former ECMA Secretary General Jan van den Beld today felt compelled to expose the hypocrisy of IBM’s smear campaign against Open XML’s supporters [http://janvandenbeld.blogspot.com/2008/04/hypocrisy.html].
As Mr. van den Beld points out, IBM has been busy getting “anti-Open XML” voices to join national standards bodies, double-voting (in Italy), authoring comments critical of Open XML for the Kenyan standards body, having IBM employees write anonymous letters to standards bodies containing factually false claims about Open XML, and welcoming Google into the 14 month standards process at the very last minute in order to have a better chance of blocking ratification of Open XML.
Oh, and let’s not forget that Avi Alkalay, who describes himself as “an Open Standards, Open Source and Linux advisor at IBM Brazil in Brazil” has called for a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack on openxmlcommunity.org, a community of thousands of supporters, users and implementers of Open XML.
It remains to be seen whether IBM and friends will stop their unethical (and sometimes outright illegal) actions. Hopefully, though, they will take the advice given to them by Mr. van den Beld, who reminds them that it’s best “to move on, particularly when you are throwing rocks while living in a house with LOTS of glass,” and asks them to “[l]et the voices of 61 countries around the world stand and stop the attacks, if only to stop highlighting your own hypocrisy.”
Posted by: Nora | April 4th, 2008 at 10:15 pm | Report this comment