It’s been over a year since I looked into it, but I recall seeing quite a few changes to ODF that were proposed by people other than Sun/IBM employees. Furthermore, most of the changes I looked at that were voted down were voted down by representatives of most of the companies involved, not just Sun and IBM. Admittedly, I only looked at a small fraction of the changes that were proposed.

Incidentally, as I understand it, Microsoft has a number of partners who are also on the EMCA technical committee in question, and I also recall that rubber-stamping in EMCA is so widespread that IBM voting ‘no’ on OOXML was considered shocking and surprising, according to a Microsoft press release at the time.

In any event, I’ve never before heard of anyone claiming that a standard which went through several years of review at the national level was railroaded through approval.

Actually that is incorrect. Sun and IBM have a voting majority in the OASIS TC Since the beginning of the standardization proces and have excluded efforts from other parties to make additions to ODF and only allow features that can be supported by their products (OOo and Lotus Notes/Symphony)

On the other hand in Ecma, Microsoft has only one vote in the Technical committees that has about 15 members, so in Ecma the other TC member can have much more influence on the format. For instance the often critisised compatibitily tags are an addition made on request of other Ecma TC members.

At the heart of the problem is that the Microsoft ecology system is so large that any standard proposed by Microsoft is pretty much given to get random support from a number of gold partners simply from the fact that these benefit from the Microsoft ecology system staying dominant.

The failure of the ISO process is pretty much caused by the late stuffing of the NBs. If you can participate in voting for Microsoft proposals without reviewing the actual proposal or taking part of the evaluation the cost for voting for the proposal is negtible.

I suggest that the rules should be changed so that you must attend say 80% of the meetings to be able to vote. If companies wishing to vote must devote significant time by attending meetings it will be in their best interest that the proposal is improved so that they get any something back from the company resources commited.

Having them really taking part also give a fair chance of convincing them that the proposal lacks technical merit when such is the case. I still think we risk flawed Microsoft crap as standards, but required attending of the workgroup in the NB will mean that Microsoft can not submit a standard as flawed as OOXML.

The more I think about this, the more I wonder if the problem is in the process, or in the standard itself?

Consider the process the ODF specification went through. I don’t have notes in front of me, but I strongly suspect that Sun had a hand in the approval process. I’m sure they voted YES on their ODF specification because it was in their own financial interest to have ODF blessed as an international standard.

The DIFFERENCE is that Sun was not the only vendor involved — they had a huge amount of input into the specification, but so did a lot of other groups. The specification really WAS a standard already, used by several other vendors, in products other than OpenOffice.org, and it was clear that ODF really was unencumbered by patents or other IP booby-traps.

Contrast that with OOXML, which never has been, and never really will be a “standard” in the sense of free, multi-platform, multi-vendor support. Microsoft doesn’t want a standard. They don’t want to interoperate with other applications, or give anyone else free access to their proprietary formats. They are looking for a fig leaf with an “OPEN” stamp on it, so that governments around the world (which are hopping on the “Open” bandwagon) can bless their MS Office products, and they can go on their merry way, ramming their monopoly products down everyone’s throats.

That being said, I’m still not convinced that Microsoft ITSELF shouldn’t be allowed to vote on its own proposed standard. What I really find troubling is Microsoft’s ability to “stack” the US V1 technical committee with all its hand-picked, bought and paid for cronies, who will vote however they tell them, allowing Microsoft to basically “buy” the US vote. They’ve got billions of dollars to hand out either over or under the table to buy votes all around the world. In some national bodies, this tactic has clearly backfired and blown up in their faces, but I’m afraid that they are still able to purchase a huge portion of the vote. I think that’s what we should be following — the money trail from Microsoft, and it’s probably a better tactic to approach in terms of correcting the holes in the standards process where one corporation can ram through its own standards and call them “Open”.

The following are some of the voting members of Incits-V1 committee reviewing OOXML ( they represent more than 70% of the total members ) , now they have voted an non inexistent text ( ECMA/Microsoft is reorganizing the text as multipart, changing conformance structure, fixing XML examples, changing scope ! , applying proposed dispositions, removing unecessary redundat normative text, changing again the date system , etc, etc ), and it supposed that fast-tracked standards are pre-reviewed and mature.

See how vendor-neutral they are:

1. http://www.3sharp.com/ 3Sharp -> Microsoft gold partner, mentioned in [2], front page says “3Sharp is a key contributor to Microsoft’s new Data Encryption Toolkit”

2. http://www.advaiya.com/ Advaiya 7 ocurrences of “Microsoft” in front page

3. BP -> ECMA TC-45 (OOXML) member

4. Microsoft -> the OOXML “perpetrator” ( the father of the beast )

5. http://www.mimosasystems.com Mimosa Systems -> Microsoft gold certified, ( http://www.mimosasystems.com/html/prod_overview.htm flagship product is “Mimosa NearPoint for Microsoft Exchange Server”

6. NextPage -> Microsoft ( http://nextpage.com/about/microsoft.htm ) certified partner

7. http://www.peters.com/ Peters & Associates -> Microsoft gold partner, 10 ocurrences of “Microsoft” in front page

8. http://www.realitymobile.com/ Reality Mobile -> flagship product transmit real-time video and geospatial coordinates WHAT THIS HAVE TO DO WITH OFFICE DOCUMENT STANDARDS ( this “member” approved inconditionally last year without ever contributing any comment, now it seems that have gone from V1 , GOOD WORK !!! thanks for contributing to standardization )

9. http://www.xinn.com Xinnovation -> Microsoft gold certified , flagship product built around Microsoft Office software

10. mindjet: Microsoft Gold Certified Partner -> flagship product http://blog.mindjet.com/2007/07/mindjet-to-present-at-microsoft-worldwide-partner-conference supports Office 2007

11. http://www.fortifieddatacom.com/ Fortified DataCom: one of flagship products runs XP with MS Office, mentioned in [1] when the company was known as Z5 technologies”

etc, etc

[1] http://blogs.msdn.com/dmahugh/archive/2007/07/09/open-xml-solution-demonstration-at-wpc.aspx

–Carlos