Office applications Toolkit

Story: Google: OOXML 'insufficient and unnecessary'

Posted by: garyedwards (Monday 3 March 2008, 7:57 PM)

Cut to the chase

The dynamics driving the document wars are simple enough. Vendor consortia seek to mask their application-platform-vendor specific proposals with the ISO/IEC cloak of interoperability.

Ecma and OASIS are vendor consortia where the rules governing standards specification work favor vendor innovation over the open and transparent interoperability consumers, governments and FLOSS efforts demand.

The trick for vendor consortia is getting their Ecma-OASIS ZERO interop proposals through ISO/IEC, where interoperability requirements rule and governments, not vendors, are tasked with the measure.

Sadly, OASIS ODF opened the door for ISO consideration of ZERO interop designed proposals. Shutting that door on Ecma OOXML is proving very difficult exactly because the primary and fundamental rule of ISO interoperability requirements has been breached. Unable to argue the fundamentals of an interoperability framework, ISO is swamped by the minutia of fully documenting application-platform-vendor specific dependencies. None of which should have made their way into an ISO/IEC proposals in the first place.

Who determines the interoperability of standards? Who is responsible for balancing vendor innovation and consumer demanded interoperability?

Some believe this job has fallen to ISO exactly because governments do not trust Ecma and OASIS vendor consortia with important standards interop. Others know that Ecma and OASIS vendor consortia seek to cloak with ISO proposals designed to protect their need to compete/defend with innovative features while keeping the interop threshold as low as possible.

And there you have it. A interop tragedy for governments, consumers and FlOSS.
~ge~

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