Letter For Iso Delegates

March 6, 2008 Dear ________________: As an employee of Red Hat, I would like to ask you to vote “NO” on the proposed standard Office Open XML (OOXML), which is currently in the last phase of the ISO/IEC Fast Track process (DIS 29500). While competition between products and solutions creates choice and reduces prices, dual standards increase cost and complexity for the end user, and can be shown to fragment the market for suppliers. Contrary to first appearance, such competition among standards actually reduces citizen choice; they have fewer or only one application to choose from which builds on a particular standard and a high probability of getting locked into proprietary solutions. In 2006, ISO certified Open Document Format (ODF) as an ISO/IEC JTC1 international standard for document formats. ODF builds on top of several other standards such as SVG for vector graphics and MathML. It is approved; it is open; and it is available for every vendor and user in our industry around the world. Many open source and commercial software packages, from Open Office to GoogleDocs and Mac TextEdit, already support ODF. However, the industry consortium ECMA is now seeking to obtain the same international standard status for the rival OOXML format from Microsoft, rather than helping converge to a single standard usable by all. In this case, where the proposed competing standard is based on old proprietary technologies of a single vendor’s product, it reinforces that vendor’s market strength and counters the desired benefit of greater competition. The normal development process within ISO to develop a standard is almost four years. Yet ECMA seeks to fast-track OOXML through the ISO process within a matter of months. The first review of the 6,000 pages of the OOXML documentation resulted in a disapproving ballot by national bodies on September 2nd with over 3500 comments. In response, ECMA submitted a proposed Disposition of Comments report that was close to 2300 pages long. With only six weeks to review this documentation (at 55 pages per day) before the Ballot Resolution Meeting, it was impossible for all technical issues to be addressed or resolved. In the final vote at the BRM, six members voted to approve the changes, four voted to disapprove, and 20 either abstained or refused to register and vote at all. Given the size of the document and shortened timetable of the process, it was impossible to review and develop OOXML in the manner necessary for it to receive due consideration as a proposed standard. Therefore, OOXML should be resubmitted through the formal ISO process so that the much-needed work of improving the specification can take place, and so that it can be harmonized with the already-approved ISO standard of ODF.

The way forward is to harmonize the formats into a common standard that is open, not controlled by any single vendor, usable by all, and that is based on modern technologies with provisions for legacy documents. For this reason, I strongly urge you to vote “NO” to OOXML (DIS 29500) in the final ISO vote this month. Sincerely,

NAME