[Solar-general] Fwd: [Ooxml-latin] UK standards body taken to court over OOXML

Vie Mayo 2 12:34:38 CEST 2008

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: David B <davidb_info en yahoo.es>
Date: 2008/5/2
Subject: [Ooxml-latin] UK standards body taken to court over OOXML
To: ooxml-latin en ffii.org

Just saw this this morning:
 http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,1000000121,39408917,00.htm?r=1

 Kudos to the UKUUG, and let's not forget the MSOOXML
 fiasco: we can still fight on this one (remember the
 ISO somehow backpedalled on the bad press at the
 approval and suggested it would be "conditional",
 anyway we are in the open-to-appeals period) ;-)
 I paste the piece of news below.
 Best regards: David B. (Spain):

 The British Standards Institution has been taken to
 court by a group of Unix users in an attempt to get
 the standards body to recant its approval of
 Microsoft's Office Open XML document format.

 The UK Unix & Open Systems User Group (UKUUG) said on
 Thursday that the British Standards Institution's
 (BSI's) controversial decision to vote for approval of
 OOXML in a recent International Organization for
 Standardization (ISO) ballot followed a flawed
 decision-making process.

 The UKUUG is also folding in many other complaints
 about Office Open XML (OOXML), such as unresolved
 patent issues and a lack of completion in the
 specification's documentation, and is calling for the
 High Court of Justice to force a judicial review of
 the BSI's decision. The UKUUG is hoping a judicial
 review would find the BSI decision to be flawed and
 reverse it.

 OOXML is Microsoft's answer to the OpenDocument Format
 (ODF), an established ISO standard based entirely on
 open specifications. OOXML is also theoretically open,
 but central to the UKUUG's legal action is ISO's
 fast-tracking of the format into standardisation
 without properly addressing its many unresolved
 technical flaws — an issue exacerbated by OOXML's
 extraordinary length as a specification, at 6,000
 pages.

 Following a highly contentious vote among national
 standards bodies, ISO announced on 2 April that OOXML
 was to become an official standard. There is, however,
 a two-month window following that date, during which
 the process can be derailed if one of the national
 standards bodies makes a formal appeal.

 Serious objections have been raised within the
 decision-making community about the approval vote —
 notably in Norway, by the head of that country's
 technical committee — but none yet have come
 officially from any country's national standards body.

 The UKUUG has been in existence for 32 years and is,
 according to Mark Taylor, the head of the Open Source
 Consortium (OSC), a "venerable organisation of men
 with long grey beards". "It is a testament to the
 feeling of injustice here," he told ZDNet.co.uk on
 Thursday. "This is the first time they've done
 something like this."

 Speaking to ZDNet.co.uk on Thursday, UKUUG head Alain
 Williams said his group's objection was that ISO and
 the BSI were "trying to put forward something that is
 not fit for purpose". "Microsoft is trying to game the
 standards process because they don't want a standard
 that can be implemented by other people," he said. "If
 they had wanted that, they could have gone with the
 ODF format [but], if they adopt something like that,
 they begin to lose their stranglehold on the desktop."

 "Something that had that high a level of contention is
 not suitable for fast-tracking," Williams added, while
 referring to Ecma — the industry standards body that
 pushed for OOXML to be fast-tracked by ISO — as a
 "Microsoft poodle".

 Williams claimed the official backing of OOXML would
 harm not only the UK IT industry, by virtue of
 perpetuating Microsoft's "monopoly", but the country
 as a whole by not using an open standard that is
 guaranteed to be usable into the distant future. "If
 you're talking about reading documents in one or two
 hundred years' time, you would have great problems in
 doing it [with documents based on OOXML]," he said.

 The OSC's Taylor told ZDNet.co.uk that the UKUUG's
 action carried with it "prima facie evidence that the
 BSI's processes have not been complied with or done in
 a very strange way".

 "A lot of us believe there are questions to be
 answered," said Taylor. "The remedy that is being
 sought is a mandatory order to withdraw the BSI's vote
 approving [OOXML]. The BSI hasn't followed its own
 processes. For example, the [claim] that it was
 unanimously decided to pass [OOXML] — it wasn't.
 People will be called as witnesses to show there are
 serious problems with the BSI's processes."

 Taylor, however, did not express confidence in the
 ability of the action — if successful — to reverse the
 ISO vote without similar actions being launched in
 other countries. "I don't believe the BSI on its own
 would be sufficient to pull the vote back, but it
 would certainly make a dent in it," he said. "Should
 there be others, it would certainly change the
 percentages [in the ISO tally]."

 The BSI had not commented on the UKUUG's legal action
 at the time of writing.

 http://www.endsoftwarepatents.org
 ------
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