"There is no reason to be browbeaten into thinking that there should only be one document format."
So says the Guardian's Technology Editor, Jack Schofield, who has followed up his computerweekly article with an "Inside IT" story today.
I also noticed this morning that Tim Anderson quotes Simon Jones who he says has written an article by in this month's PC Pro magazine but which isn't online yet though.
I’m not saying there aren’t any problems with the ECMA-376 standard. Nor am I saying ODF is bad. I do, however, believe OOXML is technically superior to ODF in many ways, and I want to see both as ISO standards so people can have the choice.
I picked a copy up at the airport on the way to Madrid. The article is interesting. It is an interesting article that summarises the ISO contradiction period, the comments received and responses to those comments. The quote Tim points to is towards the end of the article and carries on ...
I just wish everyone involved would behave like rational adults, stop all the name-calling and resolve their differences. It’s interesting that while five countries raised no “contradictions” and most gave three of four reasons for objecting, Denmark, Singapore and the UK gave seven, but Kenya was way out in front with 13.
How did Kenya raise nearly twice as many objections as the next three countries? Well, if you look at the PDF documents submitted by Kenya to the ISO committee, the Author metadata reveals they were written by Michael Breidthardt and Yoon Kit Yong. A quick search will soon find you a Michael Breidthardt who works for IBM Germany and is vice chairman of ICTSB (the European Information and Communications Technologies Standards Board), and a Yoon Kit Yong who was a member of the technical committee of the Malaysian standards board, which helped steer ODF to become an ISO standard for Malaysia. Yong writes passionately about ODF on the Open Malaysia website, which is set up to promote ODF, open standards and open-source software in Malaysia. Many of the PDF responses from other countries have Lisa Rajchel listed as their author: she works for ANSI (the American National Standards Institute) and apparently received the documents from the national standards bodies and scanned or otherwise rendered them into PDF files. Some of the documents show her postal address and others her email address at ANSI. I asked Breidthardt and Yong to comment on the standards issue, and Yong replied:
“It’s true that my name appears in one part of the Kenyan submission. I personally am honoured, but am not surprised that some of my work has been used by the national standards bodies worldwide. The information in the comments was just as public as the Grocdoc information, which I’ve also contributed to. [...] I do not know who Michael Breidthardt is. I’ve never met him, nor corresponded with him [...] The representative from Kenya must have found our contributions useful and accurate enough to stand by it and submit them as Kenya’s official commentary.”
I’m still waiting to see if I’ll get any response from the Public Affairs department at IBM Technology and Intellectual Property, to whom Breidthardt redirected my enquiry.
As for Malaysia, Yong’s country, it’s been having a little local difficulty of its own. Some people had become enthusiastic about ODF and were trying to push it as a local Malaysian standard. According to Malaysian law, this would automatically mandate that all Malaysian government departments and agencies must use ODF file formats, and the local IT vendors smelled fat contracts worth millions of ringgit for changing all the government’s office software to comply. Datuk Dr Mohamad Ariffin Anton, chief executive of the Malaysian standards body Sirim Bhd, has stepped in to suspend the process of approving ODF: he said that once everyone has cooled off, he will appoint a new evaluation committee and start the process over again. Dr Ariffin said there’d been some unprofessional conduct and lack of ethical standards by members of the evaluation committee, but declined to be more specific. There’s some evidence, however, that certain pro-ODF members were trying to steam-roller the standard through on a two-thirds majority rather than achieve full consensus, contrary to ISO guidelines. Dr Ariffin was concerned that some committee members had been unduly influenced by international companies with a business interest in promoting ODF and shutting out competing formats such as OOXML from the local market.
Interestingly Michael Breidthardt isn't just any old IBMer - he's IBM's representative in ECMA's General Assembly - so I guess he was the single negative voter. I wonder why IBM didn't participate in Ecma TC45 as Novell and Apple did. Given that they chose not to I think it's regretable that they're now doing all that they can to block in ISO. As you often hear, it's not your father's IBM.
[Update: Vlad kindly pointed me to the whole article which is now available on PC Pro's web site.]