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Whoah! Microsoft's 6000 page OOXML standard ECMA fast-tracked by Feb 5?

Tuesday Jan 23, 2007

Standards are good. Open standards are better. But when a company with a long history of anti-competitive "standards" submits a 6000 page proposal for its new "open standard" to ECMA and fast-tracked so that any objections must be raised within a few weeks,doesn't it make you wonder what they're up to? As the groklaw article above notes:

Only qualified "P" member bodies of the ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 1 ("JTC-1") have legal standing to submit such objections. Fast-track processing is the default JTC-1 status for the proposed Ecma-376 standard, more informally known as the Ecma Office Open XML ("EOOXML") standard.

All we can do is try to make sure that those with the power to slow this decision so that it can be properly considered are aware of this fast-approaching deadline. If Microsoft's lock-in history is any indication, missing this deadline could become one of the costliest mistakes in the computer industry.

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Posted at 12:03PM Jan 23, 2007 by bnitz in Open-Source
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Brian, A review of 'EMCA' identifies them as an industry organization 'doing the bidding' for many of the largest global IT businesses. Known as 'paid lobbyists' for organization members, they usually reside near government attempting to influence decision making. Deubious intent!

Posted by William R. Walling on January 24, 2007 at 04:04 PM GMT+00:00 #

I don't know about EMCA, but ECMA is a standards organization: http://www.ecma-international.org/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecma_International You might have heard of the EMCAScript language specification which has two popular implementations, JScript and JavaScript (which has nothing to do with Java!)

Posted by bnitz on January 26, 2007 at 11:28 AM GMT+00:00 #

That is ECMAScript (now you have me doing it. We must have the same kind of keyboard ;-)