05.18.08
Approval of OOXML Might Be Delayed Due to Formal Complaints
England, Poland, Norway, Denmark, Ireland…
Things are not looking all that bright for the marketing plot called OOXML, which is neither open nor XML. A few days ago we wrote about the developments in Denmark, but news reports were all in Danish [1, 2]. The complaint in Denmark merely joined a pile of other complaints and even court actions against standards bodies, including ISO (implicitly against Microsoft control or abuse of it).
A couple of weeks were supposed to remain before a final decision is made, but according to this report from Denmark (an article written in English for a change), that may soon change. It’s most likely that Microsoft will continue to divert attention away from this backlash and hope to just market OOXML (or OXML [sic]) as though it’s already an international standard.
By voting to adopt a standard based on Microsoft’s OOXML document format, the Danish national standards body has approved an unknown text against the wishes of the main representatives on its own technical committee, according to a technical committee representative from the Danish city of Aarhus. He has now made a formal complaint to Dansk Standard about the OOXML vote.
The complaint came from Jens Kjellerup, IT manager at the City Executive for Children and Young People in Aarhus, who sat on the Dansk Standard technical committee that assessed adoption of the Microsoft format as an international standard by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).
[…]
He also expressed surprise that in the first vote on OOXML in September, Dansk Standard voted “no with comments,” backed by a unanimous vote of its technical committee, and then changed its vote to a “yes” in March — although the committee this time was full of disagreement.
[…]
He explained, however, that the consequence of complaints may be that the final approval could be delayed.
The EC’s judgment on this case is still due. It’s separately yet collectively investigating the abuse in several different countries. It’s an antitrust investigation, which indicates it’s rather severe and Microsoft left a lot of work to done if all the scandals were ever to be exhaustively explored. We previously compared Microsoft’s misbehaviour to a distributed denial of service attack, wherein tracking the corruption was too difficult because there was too much of it happening too fast. It’s a fact, not an exaggeration, but not a deliberate one, either. █
Related articles (external):
- EU Commission Investigating Microsoft’s MSOOXML Push
- EC probes OOXML standards-setting process
- Is Microsoft Now Banned from EU Contracts?
- Euro MP thinks Microsoft should be banned from government contracts
- EU: Europarlement testing Ubuntu, OpenOffice and Firefox
Highlight: Novell was the first to acknowledge that Microsoft FUD tactics had substance. Novell then used anti-Linux FUD to market itself. 
Highlight: Xandros let Microsoft make patent claims and brag about (paid-for) OOXML support. 
Highlight: Linspire's CEO not only fell into Microsoft arms, but he also assisted the company's attack on GNU/Linux. 
Highlight: Microsoft craves pseudo (proprietary) standards and gets its way using proxies and influence which it buys. 
Highlight: The invasion into the open source world is intended to leave Linux companies neglected, due to financial incentives from Microsoft. 
Analysis: Xen, an open source hypervisor, possibly fell victim to Microsoft's aggressive (and stealthy) acquisition-by-proxy strategy.