Microsoft Joins OpenDoc Committee
Microsoft this month joined the INCITS/V1 Technical Committee, according to press reports. While on the surface the news sounds rather benign, the group is responsible for the reconciliation of votes to make the OpenDocument Format a worldwide standard.
The Redmond company is currently pushing its response to ODF, called Office Open XML, through the ECMA. It is also expected to look to receive International Organization for Standardization (ISO) certification.
Legal Web site Groklaw's Pamela Jones speculated that the move by Microsoft could be part of an effort to allow Open XML to catch up in the standards process.
"All they would have to do to slow ODF down, I'm thinking, is ensure lots of discussion, review, documentation, exploration, etc. to arrange that ISO can't ratify ODF until ECMA is ready to submit their competing XML," she said.
However, Jones said she hopes that she is wrong in her belief. "That would be mean and anticompetitive," she argued.
To its defense, Microsoft says the only reason it joined the committee was to ensure ratification of its own format. It also denied that it was attempting to derail OpenDocument in any way.
Microsoft's format counts some 39 official supporters that constitute the Open XML Formats Developer Group. Among its supporters are Intel, Apple and Toshiba.
No current application supports Open XML, but Office 2007 will be the first when it sees widespread availability early next year OpenDocument, meanwhile, is already supported in OpenOffice.org 2.0 and Sun's StarOffice 8.