Whilst we angrily keep writing about Microsoft's apparent attempt to 'take over' ODF [1, 2, 3], a warning from Brazil arrives. Microsoft is indeed hijacking the process and now represents an entire very large country in a meeting that involved ODF.
Last week, 1st of October, was held in Seoul (Korea) a meeting of SC34, the JTC1 committee responsible for standards as the ODF and OpenXML.
At this meeting, Brazil was represented by Microsoft.
I and several other members of our committee protested against this indication, but we had our protests silenced by the Director of ABNT (Brazilian NB) that said that this decision was not our prerogative and that if Microsoft would pay for their own representative’s trip, their indication was approved.
Also reminded us that since the beginning of activities of our group at ABNT, he tells us about having a “financial fund” provided by the committee’s organizations, to cover expenses like this. As we do not have that fund and Microsoft has offered to pay their own expenses, their indication was approved by him (rather not comment on anything about it, I get stomach ache by remembering this sad fact). Just to clarify, the other committee’s members did not indicated any representative because we tought that this wasn’t an important meeting to spend our time and money with.
The international standards body ISO has offered to help maintain the ODF document standard alongside its work on the rival Microsoft-originated OOXML specification, saying its creator Oasis is not dealing with defect reports quickly enough.
At a meeting in Korea last week, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) committee for document standards, SC 34, issued a liaison statement to Oasis, the body that created ODF. It requested an "alignment" of maintenance of ODF between the work done at Oasis and that within ISO.
Comments
Penny Lane
2008-10-07 14:32:17
When it comes to doing more than just shouting and complaing, most people don't seem to be all that interested.
It isn't as if other commitee members can't afford to participate, in many cases companies like Google, IBM etc are at the table.
Roy Schestowitz
2008-10-07 14:39:43
If bodies like these are abandoned, as Brazil and several other South American nations have considered doing (India seems likely to join soon), then we ought to show why. We ought to show how ISO gets stuffed and manipulated, then bypass it with reasonable justification.
Roy Schestowitz
2008-10-07 15:03:04
http://www.zdnet.co.uk/talkback/0,1000001161,39498926-20097639o,00.htm
"It would be interesting to know how many of the 15 national standards bodies were represented by Microsoft employees, but ISO do not publish this information..."
pcole
2008-10-07 21:23:55
It's like visiting someone's house to defecate in their living room.
Roy Schestowitz
2008-10-07 21:53:57
"...The company from Redmond is heavily investing in the ISO SC34 committee. Thanks to a brazilian blogger who manage to shed some light on what was going on in there, we hear now that Microsoft Korea was paying for dinner."
http://www.noooxml.org/forum/t-95230/sc34-thanked-microsoft-korea-for-the-dinner
Luc Bollen
2008-10-07 22:05:30
12 Microsoft + Ecma people out of 35 people ! Isn't this a record ? But of course Microsoft is NOT hijacking SC 34, as "Delegates are charged with representing national positions" (from the same horse's mouth).
Roy Schestowitz
2008-10-07 22:10:22
I'll stay up late tonight and blog some more.
Dave
2008-10-08 08:24:11
On a sidenote: as SC34 is the committee that deals with electronic documents and Microsoft products are the largest producer of such documents their input is likely to be both expert and welcome. Also it should be noted that some members of the OASIS ODF TC were present at the SC34 meeting and not just Ecma. howeverthe IBM members were notably absent.
Roy Schestowitz
2008-10-08 09:13:44