[Chapter-delegates] ooXML

[Patrick Vande Walle]

Dear Khaled,

ISOC Luxembourg has issued a position statement to the country's voting
representative at ISO, asking them to vote against the proposed standard
by Microsoft. 
http://www.isoc.lu/infotheque/avis/lisoc-luxembourg-soppose-au-standard-office-openxml/
(in French only)

Our main line of reasoning is that there is already a standard for open
document formats standardized by ISO. Further, there are several aspects
in the proposal which refer to prior and undocumented features (and
bugs) of Microsoft Office.  All in all, ooXML could not reasonably be
fully implemented by anyone else than Microsoft and certainly not on
another platform than Windows. Hence, it is not really "open".

It is worth noting that Microsoft is funding an open source initiative
to develop a converter between ODF and MS Office files.  See :
http://sourceforge.net/projects/odftranslator/
This was done after heavy pressure from the European Commission. 

For those who would need some addtional information, I can recommend
this site:  http://www.noooxml.org/ , with the usual caveat that it is
an advocacy web site.

Best,

Patrick Vande Walle


Khaled KOUBAA wrote:
> Dear colleagues,
> I would like to know what is the ISOC position and other colleagues from 
> the other chapters about the ooXML.
> The Office Open XML is  being to be standardized as an international 
> standard by the ISO.
>