US Standards Board Still Indeterminate on OOXML
Earlier this week, the InterNational Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS - despite its name, a US technical advisory group for ANSI) confirmed what BetaNews reported a week ago: A two-thirds majority has yet to be reached among the committee's V1 technical review board, with regard to whether Microsoft's Office Open XML suite of formats should be recommended for approval to its Executive Board.
That approval would be a next critical step towards OOXML being officially recommended by the US delegation to the International Standards Organization, which is currently considering OOXML for worldwide adoption. For the Executive Board to recommend it, the V1 committee must approve it first. Though unofficial reports say more voting members currently approve than disapprove, INCITS requires a two-thirds majority vote of V1 members.
There is no official account of what goes on in an INCITS committee; however, Linux Foundation board member Andrew Updegrove wrote on Monday that he has been in communication with an unnamed V1 member, who gave a very replete explanation of the goings-on at INCITS. Suffice it to say that OOXML, contrary to reports elsewhere, was not defeated; and even if V1 never reaches consensus, the Executive Board could still end up approving OOXML's recommendation, although those chances would be diminished.
As the voting member told Updegrove, once news of the consensus failure reached the Executive Board, Microsoft argued that since 96 important members' concerns had already been successfully addressed, it should issue a ballot for approving the format's recommendation. It made a motion, which was probably a long shot (though Apple was officially the one that seconded it), and it was defeated.
However, the Board did agree to issue an approval ballot that would include some 400 additional comments that remain unaddressed, perhaps dealing with more serious technical issues and reservations that members may have.
Several meetings have already been scheduled throughout August for possibly resolving those issues, Updegrove reports. Then the Board has to meet a September 2 deadline for issuing its final recommendation. By that time, it would have to have either passed the approval ballot, or rejected that ballot and passed a subsequent ballot to recommend against the format.
Despite implications by IBM developer Rob Weir that the rapid increase in the V1 group's membership is due perhaps to clandestine influence from Microsoft, it will be the Executive Board which renders a final decision on or before the first week of September. Its membership has only recently increased by two, and one of those new members is Adobe.
The jackpot for Microsoft if all this manages to go its way after all, according to many reports, is a possible approval of OOXML by the State of Massachusetts, which originally set forth the whole debate about open standards in the public sector here. But a potentially bigger prize that hasn't received much press here isn't a state or a country but a continent: Last February, representatives of 21 European Union member states met in Berlin to discuss strategies for adopting "open document exchange formats."
There, they discussed a December 2006 document from the Pan-European E-Government Services Committee which advised modifications be made to the EU's 2004 recommendations for adopting open formats. In addressing those modifications, the Committee gave equal praise to Sun Microsystems and the OASIS standards group which represent OpenDocument Format, and Microsoft, for ensuring that their respective specifications "can be implemented by any interested party, including open-source developers, without additional obligations and/or costs."
The 2004 recommendations may have been among the first to urge Microsoft to follow OASIS in submitting its XML-based format suite to the ISO. Just the fact that Microsoft is urging on the ISO standardization process - despite whatever the final outcome may be - may have already made a deep enough impression among EU members to consider OOXML on an equal plateau with ODF. In other words, it may be the effort that counts in the end.
2:35 pm ET July 25, 2007 - In response to some of our concerns, Linux Foundation board member and attorney Andrew Updegrove offered some clarifications regarding the INCITS voting procedure from here.
Among the Executive Board, Updegrove says he confirmed, there will be only 16 voting members, despite the fact that 18 are listed on the organization's Web site. When the measure to approve the OOXML recommendation, with comments attached, comes up for a vote of the board, assuming there are no abstentions, only a simple majority is required. Thus if the vote is 9 votes yea, 7 nay, with no abstentions, the measure will be agreed to.
However, if there is at least one abstention, then the rules mandate there must be a two-thirds majority among the remaining votes for the measure to pass. Thus if the vote is 9 votes yea, 6 nay, with 1 abstention, the measure would fail. One abstention would require a flip of one of the nay votes to yea, for the measure to be agreed upon.
Updegrove added that it may actually no longer matter at this point what the V1 advisory committee decides in the end. "At this point, the V1 committee is no longer relevant, as I understand it," he told BetaNews. "It is in any case, I believe, advisory to the [Executive Board] rather than dispositive. So whatever the EB decides (if it decides something) will be what will be reported to ANSI."