On Tue, 2007-04-24 at 12:34 +0200, Bernhard Reiter wrote:
I want to remind you that the ballot period about Microsoft/ECMA office document format runs until the beginning of September and national ISO bodies have to vote about the fasttrack process.
BTW: Note that using "fasttrack" is a bit confusing, the ballot period is not faster than others, as far as I know.
It is and it isn't :)
"Fast track" just means that the standard has come from an existing, trusted, standards body. Usually, ISO would form a committee, even to adopt an existing standard. On the fast track, they don't form a committee - they send it to an existing one - and simply vote on it.
So, "fast" means "relative to the ISO process".
OpenDocument took around six months to get through ISO, through a similar process that OASIS have access to.
Personally I doubt that preventing an ISO standardisation is worth very high costs, because <reasons>
I partially agree with that.
Microsoft aren't putting themselves through ISO just to feel good, though, and I don't think that it will either help or hinder their monopoly position. I think they're mainly worried about it because they want OXML to be considered standardised, and feel that Ecma alone isn't sufficient.
If OpenDocument remains the only ISO-standardised format, it gives it a raison d'etre, and maybe a little oxygen. ODF then has a market, and can grow.
Where I do agree with you: I don't think that it would prevent adoption of free software. In many ways, I could care less what the actual file format is: at the moment, I have to deal with many .doc files on a day to day basis, and I don't have any problems with that using free software. In the field of office software, getting the information out of the file (& understanding the format) is really only a small part of the overall "can I use this file" problem.
Additionally, I wouldn't ask free software developers to refrain from implementing OXML if there is demand for it. Personally, I've seen no demand - and it seems MS are having real trouble getting people to use these new formats, so the point may be moot - but there's no reason to cut our collective noses off to spite our faces.
Cheers,
Alex.