Petition against OOXML

Ted Roche tedroche at tedroche.com
Sat Jul 7 09:43:54 EDT 2007


Bill McGonigle blogged [1]:

"You can sign a petition here [2] asking the national representatives to
ISO to not approve Microsoft's OpenOfficeXML (nothing to do with
OpenOffice, of course - just named to seed confusion) application for
standards-approval by ISO. The most absurd part of the standard is that
parts of it are secret, so it’s not even a standard at all. The Open
Office Open Document Format is a much better standard, which is free to
read and free to implement, and covers the needs of office applications.
This is why everybody, including Microsoft, is embracing or at least
implementing ODF readers and writers. ODF is already an ISO Standard and
it meets the basic criteria for a standard."

[1]
http://blog.bfccomputing.com/articles/2007/06/25/sign-petition-against-ooxml

[2] http://www.noooxml.org/petition

The Microsoft document is no standard. It has blocks of property
descriptions that don't explain what they are nor how they are used.
There are no implementations of what's documented, likely not even from
Microsoft. There's no way to independently implement what's described in
the document without running afoul of licensing and patent-infringement
issues.

ISO should do better.


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