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India says no to Microsoft's OOXML

by Tushar Abraham Mathew — last modified 2007-08-24 06:04 PM

NEW DELHI: India on Thursday gave Microsoft a thumbs-down in the war of standards for office documents.

In a tense meeting at Delhi’s Manak Bhawan, the 21-member technical committee decided that India will vote a ‘no’ against Microsoft’s Open Office Extensible Mark Up Language (OOXML) standard at the International Standards Organisation (ISO) in Geneva on September 2.

“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.

The Open Document Format (ODF) alliance, enjoying widespread support from academia and corporates like Oracle, IBM, Red Hat, Sun Microsystems, Google, were in a jubilant mood having succeeded in stalling OOXML from being accepted as a standard in India.

Microsoft said it respect’s 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.

Prof DB Phatak of IIT Mumbai, who was instrumental in conducting the meetings, looked relieved after being flooded with calls from both camps over the week.

The Microsoft camp complained that when ODF was being standardised by ISO, they did not oppose it and now the ODF camp refused to return the favour. ODF supporters said they would have no problems with OOXML if all the 200 technical issues were taken care of.

Amongst hectic lobbying from both camps, the US government on Thursday said that it will abstain from voting. China has already voted a ‘No’ against Microsoft, while Malaysia, Denmark and Switzerland are supporting the software major.

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Time to petition...

Posted by CK Raju, Thrissur at 2007-09-07 02:14 PM

"Comments that accompanied the votes will be discussed at a ballot
resolution meeting (BRM) to be organized by the relevant subcommittee
of ISO/IEC JTC 1 (SC 34, Document description and processing
languages) in February 2008 in Geneva, Switzerland.
The objective of the meeting will be to review and seek consensus on
possible modifications to the document in light of the comments
received along with the votes. If the proposed modifications are such
that national bodies then wish to withdraw their negative votes, and
the above acceptance criteria are then met, the standard may proceed
to publication." http://www.iso.org/iso/pressrelease.htm?refid=Ref1070

"On 2 September 2007, ISO national bodies voted on Ecma 376, "OOXML".
The ISO secretariat has decided to move forward with a Ballot
Resolution Meeting in February 2008 to make the final decision.
Microsoft got to pass with 19 "difficulties" round one (fasttrack
OOXML) and lost round two (vote on OOXML), and now the fight moves to
round three, the definitive one." http://www.noooxml.org/start

One should also read the M$s press release
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2007/sep07/09-04OpenXMLVotePR.mspx
to know about the designs of Microsoft.

Public opinion needs to be built up now. http://www.noooxml.org/petition