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Story: ISO offers to take on ODF maintenance

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The point is that OOXML should not have been Fast Tracked.

"Fast Track specifications expect ISO to complete the specification, so they should not be rubber stamps."

I would not say it so. Indeed, these ISO procedures are very complex, probably much more than they should. Here is my vision of the whole story.

PAS and Fast Track have more or less the same objectives: having an existing standard "co-opted" by ISO. Most standard organisations have to use the PAS process, for which a number of criteria have to be met. Fast Track has been designed specifically (by and) for Ecma, and has no entry criteria.

If the system is not abused, Fast Track has basically the same result as PAS: a text extensively reviewed by a standard organisation, stable and with several implementations is endorsed by ISO as being an International Standard. So, rubber-stamping is not an issue. Accordingly, the Fast Track process is very lousy about the review process, because it is not designed for this.

The problem with OOXML was that it had not been seriously reviewed by a standard organisation, was huge and far from stable, and had not a single implementation released when it was send to ISO by Ecma for the Fast Track process. This was clearly an abuse of the process, made possible because of the lack of entry criteria.

So, rubber-stamping this text, as requested by Ecma (and indirectly Microsoft) was a problem. The obvious solution was that ISO asks Ecma to use the normal track, where a clear and proven review process is described. But despite the claims of many National Bodies, ISO refused to do this.

ISO then had to invent (interpretation of) rules on the fly, that resulted in an extensive rewrite of the 6000+ pages text to be done in a hurry. The result is that nobody implements the current text, and Microsoft warned that they have so many changes to be done in their MS Office implementation that it will not be completed before the next major release, for which no date is available yet (probably sometimes in 2010).

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