India Decides to Vote "No" For OOXML

Indian writes to mention that after an intense meeting at Delhi's Manak Bhawan the 21-member technical committee has decided to vote against Microsoft's Open Office Extensible Mark Up Language (OOXML) standard at the September meeting of the International Standards Organization (ISO). "Microsoft said it respects the government's decision. 'There were only three options "Yes", "No" and "Abstain" to be taken and we respect the government's decision,' Microsoft's legal affairs head Rakesh Bakshi said. He, however, added that India's 'No' vote will become a 'Yes' if Microsoft is able to resolve all technical issues with OOXML before the ballot resolution committee of ISO."

Good news...

[Philotechnia (1131943)]

The last time I looked at the OOXML spec, it was the most non-spec spec document I had ever seen. It was chock full of references to Microsoft's proprietary legacy code, failing to provide the details that would really allow for an open implementation. The only thing Microsoft opened up was letting developers know exactly what functionality they weren't being allowed to properly use. If this spec had been passed, it would have been an open invitation for more anti-spec specs down the road. Meanwhile, is it really a coincidence that with the advent of applications like OpenOffice, Office 2007 featured a complete revamp of the Office UI? Methinks not... Microsoft is the functional equivalent of that guy at the bar that can pick up just about any women he pleases, but is cursed with commitment issues that keep anything meaningful from developing. Bring something real to the table, billg.

Re:

[bytta (904762)]

Microsoft is the functional equivalent of that guy at the bar that can pick up just about any women he pleases, but is cursed with commitment issues that keep anything meaningful from developing.

I thought he was like the weird "friend of the family" who forced himself on almost all the girls before they learned how to say no...

Re:

[Philotechnia (1131943)]

I suppose MS and the weird friend both deserve to be on at least one watchlist...

On the other hand, can you blame him? At the risk of sounding a little weird myself, is it just me, or did India become a little, um, top-heavy over summer vacation?

/India for Playmate of the Year 2008

No need to worry...

[PinkyDead (862370)]

There's actually a simple XSL template that removes all the errors from the OOXML documents:

<xsl:template match='/'/>

Re:

[kestasjk (933987)]

What format does Apple's Pages/Keynote save to? Is it an open standard? Would Apple apologists say that it isn't open because it allows them to innovate more freely?

Is MS Office really that bad to compare it to a guy that treats women as objects?! Personally I think MS Office is by far Microsoft's best application and they deserve credit for it.
MS Office 2007's UI revamp was also a big deal. It makes it much easier to make full use of all of Office, and I'll bet you anything that OpenOffice and iWork wi

Re:Good news...

[the_B0fh (208483)]

You may actually have a point, if Apple was trying to push whatever format keynote is, as a global *OPEN* standard.

Open Standard?

[kjkeefe (581605)]

But see, that's just it... They aren't creating an open standard. They are acting like they are creating an open standard, but since it requires several proprietary pieces to work, it is really proprietary. The result is a harder time explaining to non-technical folks the negatives of locking up your content in M$'s proprietary formats and more wasted time for OO.o developers who have to reverse engineer the proprietary elements in OOXML. OOXML is proprietary, plain and simple.

They should be rejected and

Wait and see

[xra (1021817)]

Won't be surprised if a MAJOR investment from Microsoft in India is announced in the coming weeks and coincidentally the indian opposition to OOXML softened...

In related News: Germany will vote YES

[Alphager (957739)]

Germany's DIN has voted to vote YES (sorry, article in german) [heise.de] at ISO.

Re:In related News: Germany will vote YES

[bzipitidoo (647217)]

This is the sort of thing Lessig was complaining about. Voting against OOXML is such a no-brainer. Heck, not even wasting time with a vote on OOXML is perfectly justifiable. But somehow, the West's political systems can't get there. Really the only questions are how was the German vote subverted? Corruption and bribery? Trickery and gaming? And what can be done about it? Can anyone persuade MS that this sort of behavior is not in anyone's interest, not even MS's own? India and Brazil voting against OOXML is no accident-- those 2 countries RMS's favorites for their enlightened stances.

The vote may be irrelevant anyway. Lot of people are going with ODF and not OOXML, no matter what these representatives decide. Even if some give OOXML a try, it seems likely to be so bad they'll abandon it.

Re:In related News: Germany will vote YES

[GreatBunzinni (642500)]

Really the only questions are how was the German vote subverted?

Basically, Microsoft directed a global filibuster campaign in order to force MS's OOXML specifications down ISO's throat. What happened in Germany was largely the same thing that happened in other countries like Portugal, Italy and IIRC Spain.

As I'm portuguese, I've followed the portuguese case a bit closer. In that case, the modus operandi was basically to force the participation of entities as MS business partners in order to stuff the ballot, with the shockingly weird twist of barring the participation of entities like IBM and Sun due to some petty arbitrary justifications (not having enough chairs in a room, mind you). So, to sum things up, MS highjacked the process, successfully barred other entities from participating and, ignoring all technical problems and inconsistencies, proceeded to vote in favour of MS's OOXML for, IIRC, a margin of 12-6 (prior to MS the vote standed at 1-6).

Re:

[tsa (15680)]

That amazes me. I always thought DIN was the 'mother of all standards.'

Re:

[Tom (822)]

Which is kind of non-surprising, as Germany is in a quagmire of corruption right now, with the great coalition probably the best time for decades to put your party members into all layers of the administration (i.e. the layers that are not elected).
Germanies democracy has been completely undermined by the major parties at this point, and they will do anything for power and money - as an example, they are trying to raise the state support for the parties (i.e. mostly themselves) by 15% and call that "to corr

Brazilian says no too!

[rsilva (128737)]

Same in Brazil:
Brazil says no [alkalay.net]
And OpenDocument is now a national standard!

Meat is murder.

[trudyscousin (258684)]

"He, however, added that India's 'No' vote will become a 'Yes' if Microsoft is able to resolve all technical issues with OOXML before the ballot resolution committee of ISO. "

Translation: "Vote 'yes' or the cow gets it."

I'd be willing to wager, knowing Microsoft's history, that political machinations will have more to do with India's final vote than technical issue resolution.

Re:

[superpulpsicle (533373)]

Going back, that is about the story. India did supposedly have a large linux crowd. I am not sure M$ should get all the credit they deserved. Afterall you're talking late 90s when linux wasn't that polished.

minor gripe

[farlukar (225243)]

Office Open XML, not Open Office

Re:minor gripe

[Fred_A (10934)]

I think it's because of the name MOO-XML (Microsoft Office Open XML) that India voted against, since they found it offensive.

Re:

[tsa (15680)]

I just tried to explain this whole issue to someone and I tripped over the OO thing four times! Calling it Office Open XML was a brilliant move by MS, I have to give them that.

Office Obscene XML

[darkonc (47285)]

I think that we should call it "Office O bscene XML". There are two reasons for this:
1) It breaks the attempted trademark violation against Open Office, and
2) Their proprietary binary blobs really are an obscenity in the context of XML.

score 1 for professionalism, correctness, caring

[Anderlan (17286)]

This is the Right Thing to have happened. MS OOXML is not a standard:

• 6000 pages and still not a complete standard
• paraphrased: 'to comply with standard, you must implement these hundreds of features from previous versions, which are not in this standard, and which may be covered by patent'
• WTF!?!

Further evidence of MS's bad faith:

• I had never really thought about it, but the standard is named to be confused with the Open Office standard. The MS non-standard is called OOXML (Office Open XML). The Open Office standard is called ODF (Open Document Format), but you might just as well call it OOXML (Open Office XML) (I did indeed call it that before this non-standard effort came from MS). All they did was switch the words 'open' and 'office' around! That's like calling a Linux distribution SoftMicro Windows LX and saying you don't intend to confuse anyone.

Re:

[RAMMS+EIN (578166)]

``That's like calling a Linux distribution SoftMicro Windows LX and saying you don't intend to confuse anyone.''

Did you mean: Lindows?

Re:

[JohnFluxx (413620)]

From the previous name "Star Office"

Re:score 1 for professionalism, correctness, carin

[quantum bit (225091)]

How do you think "Open Office" came to get that name in the first place?

From the same place that MS got their equally generically-named "Microsoft Office" product from - the place that people go to work.

Re:

[Nossie (753694)]

think we'll see the return of Lindows since Microsoft owns the trademark by default? :)

Oh goodie, MS has to patch bugs on a deadline

[SmallFurryCreature (593017)]

Well, that won't be problem. Everyone knows that when the shit has hit the fan and the crunch is on, the MS coders get their act together and just stamp out all the errors and publish a completly fixed solution.

Any of you buying this? Anyone? I don't think even a slashdot editor would fall for that line.

MS has worked on OOXML for a long time, and it still is a mess. Remind you of anything? Like say, everything else ever released by MS?

Maybe MS hopes that the ISO vote will be postponed until MS can release OOXML SP1. After all, that has always worked before. People delayed buying OS/2 because MS promised to release a new windows that would fix everything. People waited with finding alternatives to every single windows release with promise of better things to come.

You will see if MS gets their way if news emerges of the vote being delayed. If that happens, then MS has it in the bag. Then it no longer matters if they ever fix it, if you delayed to wait for a product, you gotta buy that product or admit you were wrong in waiting.

Re:Oh goodie, MS has to patch bugs on a deadline

[e6003 (552415)]

Depending on one's definition of "technical problems" then there's a lot of patching to do because many of the problems are very deeply embedded. I don't just mean the infamous "auto space like Word 95" tags, but the lack of support for dates before 1900, the redefinition of the colourspace to clash with existing ISO standards and the hard-coded definition of non-working days to be Saturday and Sunday (which they are in Western culture but aren't in the Arabic world). A fairly comprehensive list of OOXML's failures is at http://www.grokdoc.net/index.php/EOOXML_Objections _Clearinghouse [grokdoc.net] and it's an editable wiki as well.

Re:

[oyenstikker (536040)]

"Like say, everything else ever released by MS?"

My Microsoft Natural keyboard has worked great for the past 8 years, and my Microsoft Wheel Mouse Optical for the past 4. They are both well designed, easy to use, are reliable.

Re:

[Nossie (753694)]

I said the same about my sidewinder II .... till it broke :(, was my favourite stick too :(

As I also type this on my MS keyboard and mouse... Microsoft has made some good hardware in the past, maybe they should stick to that rather than pretending to do software >:)

Re:

[CastrTroy (595695)]

Isn't it kind of ironic that some of the best products Microsoft (a software company mainly) puts out are hardware products. You'd think they would be able to get their core business right, and would have problems with stuff they are less focussed on.

123 countries vote for a standard

[tsa (15680)]

From the article: About 123 counties are participating in the vote. Does anyone here know which countries, and what they voted for, if they have voted already?

Re:

[seanellis (302682)]

Here's the official list from ISO:

http://www.iso.ch/iso/en/stdsdevelopment/tc/tclist /TechnicalCommitteeParticipationListPage.Technical CommitteeParticipationList?COMMID=4767 [www.iso.ch]

There are 32 participating countries, and 15 observers, a little short of the 123 claimed.

Re:

[dvice_null (981029)]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML#Contr adiction_phase_voting [wikipedia.org]

According to the comments placed next to the vote. It looks like majority has voted "no", and yet the majority has actually voted for "yes". Do those people actually know what yes and no votes mean?

Re:123 countries vote for a standard

[ozmanjusri (601766)]

About 123 counties are participating in the vote. Does anyone here know which countries, and what they voted for, if they have voted already?

Some of those countries "participating" are observers.

This is the best explanation of the voting process I have seen.
http://www.robweir.com/blog/2007/02/merely-flesh-w ound.html [robweir.com]

Re:

[RAMMS+EIN (578166)]

``About 123 counties are participating in the vote.''

Get your own ISO standard! Easy as 1, 2, 3!

Details on Indian campaign

[anivararavind (825859)]

Some quick links on Background of this campaign:

ODFAlliance India Mirror [odfalliance.in] on Wordprocessing-ML subcommittee discussions

Issue List [odfalliance.in] submitted to the Technical Committee by the WordProcessing ML Sub Committee

Why ECMA OOXML is not a Free Document standard [odfalliance.in] :Paper By Dr. Nagarjuna

My Earlier Post : Defeat M$ efforts to push Ecma OOXML in Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) [movingrepublic.org] Economic Times Report says

"We unanimously agree on the disapproval of OOXML with comments. The same will be submitted to ISO," National Informatics Centre head and BIS technical committee chairperson Nita Verma said after a marathon meeting that lasted over six hours. There was no need for a voting as only Infosys Technologies and CSI supported Microsoft.

Shame on You Infosys

Kudos !!!

[unity100 (970058)]

great. another indicator that india has a really developing and conscious i.t. crowd.

India loves MSFT. It is just a ploy

[140Mandak262Jamuna (970587)]

Almost all the politicians in India are falling over themselves to please MSFT. They crow about getting research facilities and other investments they attracted from MSFT. It is possible that some of the professional civil service corps produced a well reasoned arguments why India should vote against OOXML. But all it takes is a grand statement by MSFT that it is going to open another research center in Uttar Pradesh or Punjab. That will give an excuse for the very corrupt, best pol money can buy politicians of India, to overrule the civil service. It is nothing more than a simple ploy by the Govt of India to wangle a better deal from MSFT. The only question is what they are wangling for. Something for the country or something for themselves.

Sorry to be so cynical.

Technical issues

[serviscope_minor (664417)]

If they consider the tags like "DoSpacingLikeWord3ThoughtWordPerfect2ForCPMDidItB utIsActuallySlightlyWrong" which are useless for a modern format and completely unimplementable by anyone who doesn't know excatly how WP2 for CP/M does its spacing and how Word 3 for DOS differed, as technical issues, then they will never vote yes.

On the other hand, anyone voting for an international standard who doesn't consider that to be a serious problem (as there can be only one proper implementation) is either incompetant or in someone's pocket. I don't really know whichis worse.

Is ODF really much better?

[Joce640k (829181)]

Is ODF really much better as a "standard" on which to build a world or are we really just sticking it to Microsoft here?

I bet ODF has plenty of backwards compatibility issues too.

Re:Is ODF really much better?

[Twinkle (84777)]

ODF is fully specified, OOXML is not.

There's no comparison, ODF is a complete description of a document, OOXML has things like "use word 95 rules" or "important undocumented binary blob here". OOXML is a Trojan horse.

Re:

[Trelane (16124)]

If by fully specified, you mean "it completely avoided the formula issue", then yes.

False [oasis-open.org]

It will be in ODF 1.2. What version of OOXML will address its critics' points?

Re:"Technical Issues"

[mrchaotica (681592)]

You know what the worst part is? Even if there weren't any "technical issues," OOXML shouldn't be a standard because ISO already has an existing standard covering the same thing! And that preexisting standard leverages other standards (eg. SVG, MathML) while Microsoft's travesty doesn't! So even regardless of "technical issues," making OOXML a standard is ludicrously stupid!

Re:"Technical Issues"

[MuffinSpawn (914643)]

They did this same sort of thing in the web services realm with WS-ResourceTransfer even though WS-ResourceFramework already existed and did everything WS-RT does. They claimed it was a merging of their stuff (WS-Transfer) with WS-RF, but it was really a coup. With WS-RT my original feeling was that they simply didn't want to recode everything to a new standard, so they just forced everyone to accept a superset of what they were using. That's annoying enough as it is, but I can't help thinking it's more than that despite my skepticism of conspiracies.

I can only assume that Microsoft's stance on the open source community is to simply use their clout to get everyone to use their specifications, thus making it seem like they're cooperating with others. In reality they're just forcing their Johny-come-lately garbage down everyone's throat as usual. Unfortunately people want Microsoft on board with standards, so they apparently keep getting duped into doing whatever Microsoft wants them to do in the spirit of pseudo-cooperation. Yes India said "no" to OOXML, but it was qualified with room for negotiation. Don't think that this is a win for open standards just yet. It's not an open standard if only one company gets to dictate what that standard is.

Re:"Technical Issues"

[burner (8666)]

"In reality they're just forcing their Johny-come-lately garbage down everyone's throat as usual"

It's worse than that.

Consider a manager making a decision of which implementation of a standard to use. Is that person going to select the implementation by the originator of the spec or an implementation by a third party? It's about using the standard to ensure market dominance and put any competition on uneven footing.

Not according to The Economic Times

[benhocking (724439)]

If you'd RTFA [indiatimes.com], you would notice that, according to Microsoft, indeed respect does own "the government's decision".

Re:

[eviloverlordx (99809)]

You must have missed the announcement that Paramount (Not Universal, who already is HD-DVD only - my bad) and DreamWorks got $150 million between them from M$ to switch to HD-DVD only.

Re:Respect

[ozmanjusri (601766)]

Microsoft (or "M$", as your adult-self calls it) wasn't involved in the deal.

No, Microsoft's statement was:

"We provided no financial incentives to Paramount or DreamWorks whatsoever,"
Amir Majidimehr, head of Microsoft's consumer media technology group.

Microsoft (and others) provided money to the HD DVD Promotion Group. The HD DVD Promotion Group provided money to the studios.

It's called "plausible deniability".

Re:

[crossmr (957846)]

considering a lot of those nerds will find their job outsourced to india....

not to mention regardless of what americans think they don't live in a bubble and what happens in other countries, even outside of terrorism, has ramifications inside the country.

Re:

[mrchaotica (681592)]

We should really call it Obnoxiously Offensive XML, to cut down on confusion.