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."

Wait and see

[xra]

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...

Brazilian says no too!

[rsilva]

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

123 countries vote for a standard

[tsa]

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?

Kudos !!!

[unity100]

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

Re:123 countries vote for a standard

[dvice_null]

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:In related News: Germany will vote YES

[Tom]

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 correct inflation". For one, real inflation is nowhere that high, and two just a few months ago they rejected inflation correction for unemployment benefits. The only sliver of hope this has of failing is bad timing: They started it late in the summer break and many newspapers did pick it up.

Is ODF really much better?

[Joce640k]

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:"Technical Issues"

[MuffinSpawn]

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:In related News: Germany will vote YES

[GreatBunzinni]

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:In related News: Germany will vote YES

[Anonymous Coward]

In Sweden, membership in the standards organization has a very low annual few. However, just that particular committee dealing with MOOX, it cost several months take-home pay. Very few small businesses (the ones who will be hurt worst by MOOX) can shell out that kind of money, just to burn time in meetings.

The spec for MOOX is so bad it shouldn't have even gotten this far. When this is all over, Ecma's role in development of global standards will probably have to be re-evaluated.