[LINK] Social computing for government and business

[Janet Hawtin]

On 7/31/07, Marghanita da Cruz <marghanita at ramin.com.au> wrote:

> There are specific definition of Australian Standards
> > ...Australian Standards(r) of public benefit and national interest ...
> <http://www.standards.org.au/>

Standards and conformance are precisely the issue with regard to the
proposed ooxml format.
The problems as I understand them include:

   - it is mathematically broken,
   - it is in conflict with existing standards such as date and time
   - material is described in Microsoft-centric terms which cannot be
   independently developed by a non-Microsoft entity,
   - some material is not explained at all
   - the covenant not to sue is squirrelly and uncertain protection in a
   context where the law with regard to intellectual property is becoming more
   aggressive and the actions of the proposing company are frequently oriented
   around generating fear uncertainy and doubt for competing developers.

This is not news to anyone with access to a search engine:

   - the problems with the proposal have been documented explicitly
   internationally in many freely available documents online,
   - more than 20000 people have signed a petition regarding this issue.

The concern is that regardless of the proposal's mismatch with criteria for
evaluation of a standard there are standards bodies approving the format.
This is reported as being a process of branch stacking where the numbers of
people with subtle and overlapping interests outnumber the people with an
interest in the content of the document.

If the proposer wants to have a standard accepted they should make a
document which is worthy, not manipulate the process. The fact that the
proposal is being pushed through with all of these anomalies in tact undoes
the purpose of a standard. It wastes the time of people who have taken care
to develop good standards by caring about the content, and discredits the
process by approving an unusable and unsafe format.

A good standards proposal would take on board the concerns and adapted and
clarified the content which is compromising and resubmit. This process would
result in a better standard, both for the community and for the reputation
of the proposer as a stanards responsible participant.

I have pulled together some links to specific concerns raised around the
world.
It is likely you will have this information already, however I am sending
them in case they have not been sent in reference to our Australian context
where I feel we very much need a right to participate in standards because
the innovators in Australia are often new entrants and small businesses and
educational organisations. Safe
open standards are important for our information and technology economies.

=========

The following 6 questions from fsfe are important to a safe Australian
standard.
http://fsfeurope.org/documents/msooxml-questions

1. Application independence?
No standard should ever depend on a certain operating system,
environment or application. Application and implementation
independence is one of the most important properties of all standards.
Is the MS-OOXML specification free from any references to particular
products of any vendor and their specific behaviour?

2. Supporting pre-existing Open Standards?
Whenever applicable and possible, standards should build upon previous
standardisation efforts and not depend on proprietary, vendor-specific
technologies. MS-OOXML neglects various standards, such as MathML and
SVG, which are recommendations by the W3C, and uses its own
vendor-specific formats instead. This puts a substantial burden on all
vendors to follow Microsoft in its proprietary infrastructure built
over the past 20 years in order to fully implement MS-OOXML. It seems
questionable how any third party could ever implement them equally
well. What is the benefit of accepting usage of such vendor-specific
formats at the expense of standardisation in these areas? Where will
other vendors get competitive, compatible and complete implementations
for all platforms to avoid prohibitively large investments?

3. Backward compatibility for all vendors? One of the alledged main
advantages of MS-OOXML is its ability to allow for backward
compatibility, as also referenced in the ECMA International press
release. For any standard it is essential that it is implementable by
any third party without necessity of cooperation by another company,
additional restricted information or legal agreements or
indemnifications. It is also essential to not require the cooperation
of any competitor to achieve full and comparable interoperability. On
the grounds of the existing MS-OOXML specification, can any third
party regardless of business model, without access to additional
information and without the cooperation of Microsoft implement full
backward compatibility and conversion of such legacy documents into
MS-OOXML comparable to what Microsoft can offer?

4. Proprietary extensions?
Proprietary, application-specific extensions are a known technique
employed in particular by Microsoft to abuse and leverage its desktop
monopoly into neighboring markets. It is a technique at the heart of
the abusive behaviour that was at the core of the decision against
Microsoft by the European Commission in 2004 and Microsoft is until
today continuing its refusal to release the necessary interoperability
information. For this reason, it is common understanding that Open
Standards should not allow such proprietary extensions, and that such
market-distorting techniques should not be possible on the grounds of
an Open Standard. Does MS-OOXML allow proprietary extensions? Is
Microsoft's implementation of MS-OOXML faithful, i.e. without
undocumented extensions? Are there safeguards against such abusive
behaviour?

5. Dual standards?
The goal of all standardisation is always to come to one single
standard, as multiple standards always provide an impediment to
competition. Seeming competition on the standard is truly a strategic
measure to gain control over certain segments of a market, as various
examples in the past have demonstrated. There is an existing Open
Standard for office documents, namely the Open Document Format (ODF)
(ISO/IEC 26300:2006). Both MS-OOXML and ODF are built upon XML
technology, so employ the same base technology and thus ultimately
have the same theoretical capabilities. Microsoft itself is a member
of OASIS, the organisation in which the ODF standard was developed and
is being maintained. It was aware of the process and invited to
participate.
Why did and does Microsoft refuse to participate in the existing
standardisation effort? Why does it not submit its technological
proposals to OASIS for inclusion into ODF?

6. Legally safe?
Granting all competitors freedom from legal prosecution for
implementation of a standard is essential. Such a grant needs to be
clear, reliable and wide enough to cover all activities necessary to
achieve full interoperability and allow a level playing field for true
competition on the merits. MS-OOXML is accompanied by an unusually
complex and narrow "covenant not to sue" instead of the typical patent
grant. Because of its complexity, it does not seem clear how much
protection from prosecution for compatibility it will truly provide.
Cursory legal study implies that the covenant does not cover all
optional features and proprietary formats mandatory for complete
implementation of MS-OOXML. So freedom of implementation by all
competitors is not guaranteed for the entire width of the proposed
MS-OOXML format, and questionable even for the core components.
Does your national standardisation body have its own, independent
legal analysis about the exact nature of the grant to certify whether
it truly covers the full spectrum of all possible MS-OOXML
implementations?

All these questions should have answers that should be provided by the
national standardisation bodies through independent counsel and
experts, and in particular not by Microsoft or its business partners,
which have a direct conflict of interest on this issue. If there is no
good answer to any one of them, a national body should vote no in
ISO/IEC.

======================

This is a post about the specifics of the way formulas are implemented
for open document format and for other spread sheet formats including
in ooxml.
The author explains that the ooxml format produces a mathematically
incorrect result.
http://www.openmalaysiablog.com/2007/07/mathematically-.html

It would be great if our processes were more transparent so that
people who have worked on date and time standards in Australia can
identify and point out where problems exist.
http://www.robweir.com/blog/2006_07_01_robweir_archive.html

Conversion is not a safe path if some material is non-standard,
binary, restricted or undefined. If conversion between systems
involves interoperability with other standards and ooxml is not
compliant with those standards then ?
Free Software Foundation Europe, Guest Commentary: The converter hoax
http://www.heise.de/open/artikel/92735 16.07.2007 12:02

This paper outlines some of the specific areas where the proposed
material includes Microsoft specific naming and undefined content.
Glenn Strong < Glenn.Strong at cs.tcd.ie>
Ciaran O'Riordan < ciaran at fsfe.org>
http://ifso.ie/documents/correspondence/20070710iso-ooxml.pdf