Sharing Nicely

Rumours had been making the rounds since Sunday evening, but now it’s confirmed that a fundamentally flawed standardisation process has — not surprisingly — resulted in a fundamentally flawed new ISO standard for open documents ISO 29500. Faced with all of the lobbying might of a powerful international corporation, many standard bodies in smaller countries were simply overwhelmed by having to review a proposed standard specification that was more than 6000 pages long. Overlap with an existing standards, ISO 26300 was pointed out during the first phase of the fast-tracked process, in an unprecedented level of concern, but brushed aside. Subsequently technical committees were loaded with Microsoft resellers and partners, often by setting up “training sessions” that were then turned into technical committees. It needs to be noted that the ISO process guidelines offered little help against this direct influence by one corporation, as they remained confusing to all, but the most experienced standards experts, until the very end of the voting process.

What does it mean? South African bloggers have found a variety of ways to look at this process from different perspectives. Andrew Rens argues positively that in fact most of the world rejects OOXML since India, China, South Africa and Brasil all voted NO; and Brian Bakker points out that Microsoft Corrupted the ISO Process, which will increasingly be a problem as corporations are looking for ISO approval of their solutions, to fulfill government’s request technology that supports open standards.