Office Open XML Ballot Results

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Ecma International submitted Ecma-376 (Office Open XML Standard) to the ISO Fast Track process. After a comment period the ISO held a ballot that closed September 2007. This has been observed to be perhaps the most controversial and unusual ISO ballot ever convened, both in number of comments in opposition, and in unusual actions during the voting process. Various factions have strongly supported and opposed this fast track process: primarily on one side Microsoft affiliated companies in support and on the opposing side free or open source software organizations, IBM and affiliates, SUN Microsystems, and Google.

There have been reports of attempted vote buying^[1]^[2]^[3]^[4], heated verbal confrontations, refusal to come to consensus and other very unusual behavior in national standards bodies.^[5]^[6]^[7]^[8] This is said to be unprecedented for standards bodies who usually act together and have generally worked to resolve concerns amicably.

87 ISO member countries responded to the five-month ballot. There were 51 votes of "approval", 18 votes of "disapproval" and 18 abstentions.^[9]

For the measure to pass, 2/3rds of "P" members (participating, as opposed to "O" members: observing) must approve and less than 1/4 of all voting national members (excluding members that abstain from voting) must disapprove. The balloting shows 53% approval by "P" members and 26% disapproval from the total votes.

[edit] Significant comments by national standards bodies

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BR - Brazil - Disapproval comments made by Brazil that are potentially unresolvable center around proprietary Microsoft formats not being available publicly:

BR Part 4 [1]2.15.3.31 etc "lineWrapLikeWord6"
BR Part 4 Section 6.4.3.1 and 6.4.2.10 te - support other formats including PNG, OGG
BR section 7.4.2.5 Pg. 5122 te - windows clipboard values
BR section 7.4.2.5 Pg. 5122 te - specify GUID and FMTID

example: BR-section-2.15.3-Pg. 1368-te-The “Compatibility Settings” are not available to understand how the document is rendered.-The references in the “Compatibility Settings” section should be made to full publicly available information.

ES - Spain- (sic.) There is no possible to get the necessary consensus in the mirrow committee to support either of the other positions

FR - France - The 122 pages of disapproval comments by AFNOR begin with a proposal to split the Office Open XML standard into two sections: core functions and legacy file formats and further to merge the Office Open XML standard into the OpenDocument standard. AFNOR also takes issue with the document itself citing numerous internal inconsistencies and lack of adherence to standard. The majority of the comments are technical and many of these again focus on lack of publicly available information on Microsoft proprietary formats used by the Office Open XML standardization document.

example: F4038 Part4, Section 2.15.3.32 mwSmallCaps (Emulate Word 5.x for the Macintosh Small Caps Formatting) page 1427, lines 13-18 te This definition is intrinsically based upon material that is not part of the Office Open XML submission, and that is not part of any known standard either. As such, it cannot be accepted. A proper definition must be provided for the mwSmallCaps feature, or the feature must be removed altogether. Define the mwSmallCaps feature properly or drop it from the Office Open XML proposal.

US - United States - Approval with 44 pages of comments. Since the approval has been given, the significant comments detailed in the ballot do not have to be addressed. Potentially ANSI could reverse their vote if the comments are not addressed, but observers think it unlikely.

example: US ge The use of proprietary file formats within the Office Open XML standard appears to cause potential intellectual property ownership concerns.

BG - Bulgaria - Approval with minor changes requested including compatibility with Date & Time standards, independence from IP, and finally Cyrillic characters.

IN - India - BIS the Indian standards national body submits 16 pages of comments with their disapproval vote. Although short in length there are many issues that may not be able to be resolved before the February ISO BRM meeting. BIS requests that all references to proprietary software be removed. BIS requests macros for legacy translation. BIS states 'The document encoding standard is not hundred percent decodable - it should be hundred percent decodable'. Many of the same objections to legacy format behavior are given, again referencing the proprietary Microsoft formats, and requesting that the formats be made publicly available.

BPS(PH) - Philippines- BPS disapprove comments are comparatively short consisting of 2 pages of comments. They begin with comments about borders, math functions and finally end with the complaint that "exactly how Word 95 autospaces is a Microsoft Company secret". No proposed changes are given in the comments by the BPS.

GB - Great Britain (United Kingdom)- BSI's 98 pages of disapproval comments begins with the observation that the name Office Open XML is much too similar to Open Office XML and should be changed. Further into the document the BSI states that inappropriate PR hyperbole should be removed from the document. After many pages of edit and technical correction suggestions, on page 26 BSI begins suggesting that Office Open XML must interoperate with OpenDocument standard. On page 34 objections to DrawingML and VML are brought up. On page 39 the BSI says It looks very much like it is mapping directly to the arbitrary choices of a single vendor's application. This clause should be rewritten to express this feature in an application- and platform-neutral way. Much of the remainder of comments are about legacy formats and interoperability problems and edit corrections.

More information on the different submitted comments by all voting countries can be found on www.dis29500.org.