Brazil votes against Open XML

The Brazilian organization in charge of technical standards has decided to vote "no, with conditions" to Microsoft Corp.'s Office Open XML document format during an International Organization for Standardization (ISO) meeting on Sunday.

The Brazilian Technical Standards Association, or ABNT in Portuguese, voted unanimously against Open XML, pointing out 63 issues related to the document format during a final meeting last week prior to the ISO session.

The ABNT position was also supported by local government organizations, ministries, commissions and advisory boards. The vote was taken after a clarifying speech made by ABNT Director Eugenio Guilherme Tolstoy De Simone.

Among the issues cited are lack of compatibility with the Gregorian calendar, lack of support for languages such as Chinese, Japanese and Korean, and security issues including the possibility of password breaches and vulnerability to viruses.

The decision of "no, with conditions" means Brazil can change its vote if these issues are solved. Those involved in the process consider that unlikely.

"Microsoft Brazil believes the technical agreement effectively represents an opportunity of evolution in the standard," the company said in a statement responding to the decision. The company pledged to "interact with society, private companies, corporate associations, universities and federal local government in order to develop Open XML."

IBM Corp. also weighed in on the matter. "Our impression is Open XML is a standard done in a hurry", said Cezar Taurion, new technologies manager at IBM Brazil. "Open XML is not mature enough and we think it is worth to be outlined again, since we already have an ISO standard which does not exclude any technology."

Open XML, which is the default format in the Office 2007 suite, competes with the OpenDocument Format for XML, or ODF, which is an ISO standard.

Besides Brazil, a technical committee in India last week unanimously voted to reject the format ahead of the ISO meeting. Although the U.S. representative organization to the upcoming meeting had said that it would vote no as well, it since has signaled an intention to vote "yes, with comments."

The executive board of the International Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS), based in Washington, D.C., is scheduled to meet again on Wednesday and take up the proposal one more time before submitting its final vote to the ISO.

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Comments (3)

Open XML can never be a standard

by Gary Dale 9/11/2007 12:00:00 AMThere are several critical reasons why M$ OpenXML cannot be accepted as an ISO standard. Most importantly is that it conflicts with other established standards, such as date formatting, in ways that would require the proposal to be extensively rewritten. In fact, the OpenXML 'standard' contains many references to proprietary and closed items, preventing anyone but M$ from actually implementing it. And the entire 'standard' is written in such a complex fashion as to preclude anyone from even making the attempt. Moreover, why would ISO require two document formats covering the same area? If M$ was interested in ISO standards, why didn't it simply adopt the already standard OpenDocument format? The simple fact is the entire submission exercise is a marketing ploy by M$ to try to counter the increasing adoption of office products that follow the existing standard. This type of cynical manipulation of ISO for commercial gain doesn't deserve the amount of press it has been getting. The sooner ISO rejects it outright, the better.

doubt

by doubt 9/4/2007 12:00:00 AMI believe Open XML is NOT used as the default format in the Office 2007 suite. What is used in Office 2007 is only a subset of Open XML specification with proprietary extensions. If I'm not mistaken.

good on you

by john 9/4/2007 12:00:00 AMI wish australia would say no and go with linux, http://www.zoopgames.com