Andy Updegrove covers the news (and it's significance) on this first phase of the fast track process for Ecma International's submission of Open Office XML (OOXML) to ISO.
As Andy observes, there has been a lot of controversial discussion about defining "contradiction" and what might constitute such a thing. This is what happens when we allow Microsoft lawyers to debate standards, rather than engineers who will need to implement them. I hear echoes of, "It depends on what the meaning of the words 'is' is." Not liking the rule, we'll attack the definitions.
With 19 countries offering contradictions to be resolved, it will indeed be fascinating to see how Ecma International handles it all. The midnight oil will burn brightly in Redmond, which is only fair considering how many countries worked hard to get through the 6000+ page specification by the deadline. The clock is counting down to 28 February.
I would offer, however, that a contradiction should not be defined as a simple overlap with another standard. This is economically a poor yardstick to use. We all saw this coming last Spring. At the time I observed:
While ISO certainly doesn't like to encourage competing or overlapping standards, they will not necessarily prevent them. They are a standards development organization in place to ensure that the rules of development are transparent and followed. It is not their role (nor do you ever want it to be) to manage the marketplace through determining the economic viability of a standard.
By all means send the Ecma International specification back for some of the egregious internal conflicts, and ugly artifacts like date redefinitions. But let the market decide which standard has the best value proposition to solve customer problems with the most implementations. [We already know which will win.] Consider the IEEE 802 standards family. If they didn't allow standards that overlap in functionality, we would still be living on star LANs.
Copyright javabell, all rights reserved. Used with permission.
Marbux makes a convincing argument that the definition of "contradiction" is defined by international treaty, and that it is rather irresponsible for people to keep pulling definitions out of thin air to suit their desires.
In particular, in keeping with your reference to "economically a poor yardstick", the underlying definition seems to be that ISO is not supposed to prepare or adopt standards that would pose an unnecessary barrier to international trade.
The key word here is unnecessary — if there is a reasonable technical rationale for having overlapping standards, then there is not necessarily a problem.
The problem with Ecma 376 (OOXML), however, is that no one seems to have given any plausible reason why it is infeasible to use OpenDocument format (ODF), and simply propose extensions to ODF for any missing functionality. Every time an OOXML proponent suggests that it is needed for "backward compatibility" because ODF does not support feature X, we should be asking why it would be such a problem to add X to ODF.
Absent such a justification, it seems hard to deny that multiple incompatible formats competing for the same market (as opposed to multiple competing implementations of the same format) do form a barrier to international trade—they will either cause massive duplication of effort as everyone scrambles to support both formats, or massive incompatibility as the world divides into different "camps". (Yes, in the long run it is certain that one format will win, but Microsoft's overwhelming market power could make the short run last for many years even if it has the losing format.)
Posted by: Steven G. Johnson | 09 February 2007 at 08:35