Idle State

I have been doing a large amount of reading on ODF vs OOXML over the last few days - particularly as the verdicts of various countries' standards bodies become finalised. There a quite a number of publicly available analyses of the ECMA-376 Office Open XML Spec available for reading on the internet - comments on Groklaw and the British DIS 29500 Wiki are particularly comprehensive.

Several thoughts strike me as I read though the wealth of material:

Where are the safeguards that prevent interference in standards organisations' decision making processes? Incits would appear to have been stacked over the last few months to create a favourable decision for the proposer of the standard. Surely the composition of voting rights should be decided at the outset of the consideration of a particular proposal. The least of the problems is that the composition of voting members becomes unrepresentative. Other concerns are that a voting member who joins in the last few days prior to an actual vote has not undergone the same exercise in diligence of the proposed standard as the other members.

Furthermore, in the case of documented interference (see www.noooxml.org) there needs to be some mechanism of automatically registering a "no" or "yes" vote, for the standards body in the country that has been interfered with, to counter the interference. This cannot be at the discretion of the standards body of the country involved since their vote is possibly tainted. This effectively immediately removes the sting from any attempted interference.

It would seem that the standards processes are ill-equipped, possibly naïve, for dealing with the intense lobbying and influence of commercial interests. Standards and Standards processes must have unyielding integrity.

Secondly: What the hell were ECMA thinking? They should be downright embarrassed. Given the lack of quality, lack of clarity and lack of technical integrity of the document that they have proposed as an ISO standard, clearly ECMA have failed in their duty at being a trusted source for candidate standards. ECMA should no longer have right to submit a proposed standard for fast tracking.

Thirdly - and this is more a personal note - the countries which I am closely related to - Australia and Qatar - are distressingly quiet on this issue. The Qatar Government is an entrenched Microsoft shop. It's IT environment is immature and somewhat subservient - so I guess it's not much of a surprise that not a wrinkle has emerged from here. Australia's response which amounted to "we're not completely happy with this proposed specification" is insipid in the extreme.

Lastly: Is ECMA-376 indicative of the quality of work that is carried out within Microsoft? The poor workmanship of the ECMA standard speaks volumes about the quality of processes, thinking and product created by Microsoft. It serves to demonstrate yet again that Openness (Source and Standards) yield quality whilst closedness leaves you with a steaming pile of crap. After this demonstration we get a deeper understanding of why Microsoft do, indeed, have reason to fear Open Standards and Open Source.

Back to the beach.

Technorati Tags:
Peeves, Software