Rob

By now you have all seen the news. Andy Updegrove appears to have have the most coverage and analysis of that story, so I’ll try not to repeat stuff that you can easily read there.

The short of it is that DIS 29500 has failed in its attempt to be approved as an International Standard. The Microsoft spinmeisters are trying to make defeat sound like it is a good thing, that this is just the next step in the approval process.

Jason Matusow claims that “The next 6 months will be where the rubber really meets the road for the work on Open XML.” This is nonsense. The work should have been done back in Ecma, before submission to ISO. Fast Track is not a standards development process. It is intended for standards that are already completed and for which there is already industry consensus, to quickly transpose them into International Standards. Fast Track starts at the last stage, the Approval stage, of ISO’s 5 steps. By this point it is assumed that the text is complete, accurate, and has already been thoroughly reviewed. Since JTC1 NB’s have registered hundreds of technical flaws in OOXML, it is clear now that it never should have been put on Fast Track in the first place. The types of errors that are being reported now should have been found and fixed back at the committee draft stage or earlier, in Ecma. This defeat is an indictment of Ecma’s shoddy review. It is an abuse of ISO process for Microsoft to try to ram it through Fast Track in this state. They deserve the rebuke they have been given for this poor judgment.

Let’s drill into the numbers a bit and see what this all means.

First, recall JTC1’s two approval criteria for Fast Track submissions:

• 2/3 of JTC1 P-members must approve
• No more than 25% of total votes may be negative

In both cases those NB’s that Abstain or do not vote are ignored.

So, the ballot results for OOXML appear to be:

P-members: Approval: 17, Abstain: 9, Disapprove: 15. With only 53% Approval of P-members, DIS 29500 fails by the first criterion.

Overall vote: Approval: 51, Abstain: 18, No: 18. With 26% overall Disapproval, DIS 29500 also fails by the second criterion.

Microsoft highlights this second number (74%) in their press release, but does not even mention the P-member number. This is deceptive since even if they raised that number to 76% OOXML would have still failed. Only P-members can cause a Fast Track to be approved.

What is interesting is the large number of NB’s who participated in this process that have never participated in JTC1 before (at least to my knowledge). In fact, a number of them have such a strong interest in JTC1’s activities that they have joined as P-members — the highest level of participation — in some cases only in the last week or so. This is, I assume, what Tom Robertson, Microsoft’s GM of Interoperability and Standards, means when he talks of “rejuvinating” standards bodies:

Robertson dismissed criticism of Microsoft’s efforts to encourage its partners to join standards bodies. Most standards bodies are filled with “an old guard” membership that needs rejuvenation, he said. He also likened Microsoft’s recruitment efforts to a voter registration drive. “Have we been speaking to our community of companies about this issue? Yes, we have,” he said. “They needed to know. They, in many cases, decided to participate. [But] there is no basis to allegations that we are gerrymandering the process.

“Old Guard” NB’s appear to be those like Canada, France, New Zealand, Japan, Korea, Ireland, China or Norway that voted against OOXML. The new blood presumably are countries like Cote d’Ivoire, Syria, Kazakhstan and Tanzania that are participating in JTC1 for the first time, and voting in favor of OOXML.

JTC1 has historically had a rather stable membership of NB’s active in its technical agenda. There has been only a slow increase in membership, 1 NB joining in 2001, but none in 2002, 4 joining in 2003, 1 joining in 2004, none in 2005, 4 joining in 2006. But in 2007 JTC1 has been blessed with 12 new P-members, many of then joining in only the last week. There is a very clear trend in how these new P-members have voted:

In that table I’m defining “old guard” as those NB’s who were P-members of JTC1 before the OOXML process started. As you can see, the “old guard” voted overwhelmingly against OOXML by 2-to-1 margins. But the new P-members have almost all voted in favor of OOXML.

We can look at this graphically as well, showing the P-member composition of JTC1 over time and how they ultimately voted. As you see, JTC1 was overwhelmingly against OOXML until the blip at the very end, when Kazakhstan, etc. joined.

Another difference between the “old guard” and the “rejuvenated” membership is the level of public input and industry participation in their national committees. The old guard members had public forums, invited all sides to come in and speak, had all their stakeholders participate, reviewed technical comments and tried to come to a consensus. With openness like this, no wonder Microsoft believes they need rejuvenation! The new members, well… let’s just say the transparency of their decision making process is not uniformly great.

(6 Sept 2007 Update. I’ve removed the previous mention of CPI correlations to avoid confusion. The “transparency” of a national standards body’s process does not bear any necessary relationship with a country’s overall business climate. We’ve certainly seen in-depth, thorough technical reviews in the developing world, and we’ve seen suspect political dealings even in the United States. With the specific instances so damning to Microsoft, there is no need to make generalizations.)

I suppose that no one should be surprised that Microsoft, which has been stuffing committees at the national level throughout this ballot, would also attempt the same at the JTC1 level. From what I have been able to determine, NB’s, never having sat in a single JTC1 meeting and never having joined a single JTC1 technical committee, were able join as a P-members, in the last hours of the OOXML ballot, simply by sending an email to ISO.

Although this attempt to juice their results by signing up new P-members did not help Microsoft win approval for OOXML, it remains to be seen what adverse effect this will have on other JTC1 activities. We need to remember that a participation rate of 50% of JTC1 P-members is required to transact most JTC1 business. So this “rejuvenation” may very well paralyze JTC1 entirely unless the new members are earnest and participate in ballots beyond OOXML.

We’ve heard a lot of coverage of events in Sweden, Mexico, Australia, the US, etc. But we should remember that there are 150 or so countries eligible to vote. Here is a first-person account of the Microsoft medicine show in Ghana, from Kwasi at Ramblings of an African Geek:

So, the Q&A section rolls around, I asked some questions and an attempt was made by the MS reps to paint me as ill-informed and obtaining all my information from blogs on the internet run by anti-Microsoft fundamentalists. Oh, and of course IBM was mentioned as the prime company lobbying everyone and providing them with groundless reasons to vote against OOXML. Then came the best tactic of the day. Dismissing my questions as ‘too academic’ and ‘concerned with the needs of other nations, not Ghana’. After I stopped being annoyed at the attempt to shut me down, I was highly amused.

From Africa News is a report “African civil society warns Microsoft“:

(FOSS) Foundation for Africa (FOSSFA), Ms Nnenna Nwakanma, told HANA that Nigeria like any other African country stands to gain by properly investigating the issue on the ground, stressing that Microsoft lobbyists have not been able to convince stakeholders how the OOXML document formats would benefit the public except for those who have Office 2007, which is a proprietary software .

“Only those using Office 2007 can benefit from it. If you use any Office apart from 2007, you first have to upgrade. I cannot understand why norms cannot be used unless certain proprietary changes had to be made,” she said.

On the implication of voting ‘No’ to OOXML being proposed by Microsoft to Africa, especially in relation to e-School initiative, she said, already some African countries are warming up to embrace Open Document Formats (ODF), as an alternative file format.

But back to Sweden. My, my, what a mess. I suspect the same has happened elsewhere, including the US. But no one has been so careless as to leak a memo over here. We feel left out! So, if anyone has a similar “smoking gun” letter sent by Microsoft to line up MS Partners in the US to join INCITS V1 at the last minute, and doesn’t know what to do with it, you might consider letting me know. I’ll trade an original copy of the Utica Saturday Globe of Sept 21st, 1901, the President McKinley memorial issue, with full coverage of his funeral and burial, including a still brilliant page one color portrait (over the fold) of McKinley with Lady Liberty on the side, weeping, draped in flag with shield. Suitable for framing. A true collector’s item for any McKinley fan.

(Trivia: Ever wonder why there are so many McKinley High Schools in the US? Because so many of schools were built after soon after his death.)

So what is wrong with stacking a committee? Isn’t it just an expression of our freedom to associate? An interesting perspective from the Supreme Court, in a case that no one is talking about, but everyone should know: ALLIED TUBE & CONDUIT CORP. v. INDIAN HEAD, INC., 486 U.S. 492 (1988). This appears to be the highest profile case involving stuffing a standards committee:

Petitioner…can, with full antitrust immunity, engage in concerted efforts to influence those governments through direct lobbying, publicity campaigns, and other traditional avenues of political expression. To the extent state and local governments are more difficult to persuade through these other avenues, that no doubt reflects their preference for and confidence in the nonpartisan consensus process that petitioner has undermined. Petitioner remains free to take advantage of the forum provided by the standard-setting process by presenting and vigorously arguing accurate scientific evidence before a nonpartisan private standard-setting body. And petitioner can avoid the strictures of the private standard-setting process by attempting to influence legislatures through other forums.

What petitioner may not do (without exposing itself to possible antitrust liability for direct injuries) is bias the process by, as in this case, stacking the private standard-setting body with decisionmakers sharing their economic interest in restraining competition.

(Over on Slashdot one reader says of the above, “And I don’t think normal people go around reading and quoting 20 year old anti-trust cases for fun.” You don’t know me very well, do you? I read legal analysis for fun. I have my own copy of Tribe’s “American Constitutional Law”, a facsimile edition of Blackstone’s “Commentaries on the Laws of England”, a three volume set of the writings of Edward Coke, and Fergus Kelly’s “A Guide to Early Irish Law”. Never confuse me with normal. But never confuse me for a lawyer either. I don’t generalize well.)

In the “When Your Mom is the Beauty Pageant Judge” department comes news that the most influential “products, applications or technologies of the past 25 years”, according to a super duper scientific poll by CompTIA, is Internet Explorer. Second place is Microsoft Word. Third place is Microsoft Excel. And tied for Fourth Place is Windows 95.

Joe Wilcox over at Microsoft Watch takes a pin to the Microsoft-sponsored puff piece IDC did on OOXML called “Adoption of Document Standards.” And if the data is not rosy enough, Microosft can make it look even better by cutting off the y-axis labels to make a more impressive bar chart. “This one goes to eleven.” You could spend hours exposing the flaws in that paper, but why bother? Life is too short.

Wait… this just in. In a survey of most dumb-ass Microsoft-sponsored surveys of August, first place goes to CompTIA’s “Microsoft, Creator of Civilization, Inventor of Fire & Universal Benefactor of Mankind” and second place goes to IDC’s “4% Looks More Important in a Bar Chart if the Maximum is set to 5%.”

This one brought a smile to my face. Software Engineer job postings at Red Hat in Pune. Resumes must be submitted in ODF format.

Freecode in Norway has link to an an essay [pdf] by Sun’s XML Architect, Jon Bosak entitled “Why OOXML Is Not Ready for Prime Time”. Although I may disagree with Jon on the suitability of this single-vendor format for international standardization (His position is more along the lines of “Not yet” while mine is more like “Hell no”), I must admit he makes some excellent points.

Also, the Linux Foundations Desktop Architects have a statement just out: OOXML – vote “No, with comments“

And speaking of “No, with comments”, now that the Microsoft checks have presumably cleared, self-proclaimed “standards activist” Rick Jelliffe, is recommending that Australia vote “No, with comments.” This after a summer of speaking in favor of OOXML in India, Thailand (twice), Australia, New Zealand and who knows where else. How unfortunate for us all that his sage advice comes only after Standards Australia and most other countries have already finished their deliberations. I can only respond with the words of Lord Byron, from his “Ode to Napoleon”:

And she, proud Austria’s mournful flower,
Thy still imperial bride;
How bears her breast the torturing hour?
Still clings she to thy side ?
Must she too bend, must she too share
Thy late repentance

In the following post Rick reinterprets time, gives sophistry a bad name and takes such liberties with geometry that would make M.C. Escher blush, all in attempt to show that OOXML is really not 6,000 pages long, and it really wasn’t created in less than a year. You can read his attempt to seek a logical basis for redefining reality to fit his preconceptions here, or just consult my one-slide summary below.

(Oh, Rick. One more thing. My last name is shared by Australia’s most famous film director, Peter Weir. I manage to spell your name right. Maybe this mnemonic will help you spell mine right.)

Microsoft’s Stephen McGibbon updates us on the OOXML Ballot Resolution Meeting (BRM), now scheduled for February 25-29 in Geneva. He ends his otherwise informative post with a little jab:

I hear that IBM is still telling national bodies that a BRM isn’t guaranteed. I am unsure how IBM reached that conclusion but this seems to be concrete evidence to the contrary.

Well, let me help refresh Mr. McGibbon’s seemingly repressed memories.

First, scheduling a BRM does not guarantee it will be held. For example, have you heard of DIS 26926 “C++/CLI”? It was another Microsoft/Ecma Fast Track, just last year. The BRM meeting announcement went out on 25 October 2006, saying the BRM would be held 13-15 April 2007 in Oxford, England. Stephen, do you recall that BRM by any chance? Of course not, because it was canceled in February 2007 with the following message from the SC22 Secretariat:

We have been advised that the comments accompanying the Fast Track ballot for DIS 26926 are not resolvable and that holding a Ballot Resolution Meeting (BRM) would not be productive or result in a document that would be acceptable to the JTC 1 National Bodies. Therefore, our proposal is to not hold the BRM and to cancel the project.

So there is one example of a BRM that was scheduled and then canceled.

Want another? Sure, I can do that.

Take the case of DIS 26300 “Open Document Format.” A Ballot Resolution Meeting was scheduled for May 29 to June 1, 2006 in Seoul, Korea, concurrently with the JTC1/SC34 Plenary. But was the BRM actually held? No. It was canceled by the Plenary:

Following the advice of the JTC 1 Secretariat, JTC 1/SC 34 cancels the previously-scheduled ISO/IEC 26300 Ballot Resolution Meeting and the SC34 Secretariat will forward the revised DIS text and accompanying disposition to SC34 national bodies for a 30-day default ballot when ready.

Why? Because ODF received no Disapproval votes. Although 8 of the 23 NB submitted comments with their ballot, these were all “Approval, with Comments” votes rather rather than “Disapproval, with comments. So a BRM was not deemed necessary. Only comments that accompany Disapproval votes must be addressed at a BRM.

So there you go, two examples of BRM’s that were scheduled, but then canceled. The SC Secretariat has some discretion here. JTC1 Directives, Section 13.5 says, “In some cases the establishment of a ballot resolution group is unnecessary and the SC Secretariat can assign the task directly to the Project Editor.” The two examples given show that if a ballot passes by large margins, or fails by large margins, a BRM may not be necessary.

How about another example from the recent past, the Fast Track DIS 29361 “Information technology – Basic profile.” Their ballot closed on June 18th. Its ballot passed with 17 of 20 P-Members voting in favor of it. All Disapproval votes were accompanied by comments, as did one of the approval votes. Since there were Disapproval votes surely there must have been a BRM, right? No, that’s not how it worked. The JTC1 Secretariat decided a BRM was not necessary and the comments could be forwarded directly to the Submitter of the Fast Track for them to “review and respond”. So even having Disapproval votes does not guarantee a BRM will be held.

Does this make more sense now?

Of course, Microsoft already knows all this, and no doubt that is why they are working so hard to urge NB’s to vote “Approval, with comments” with promises that their comments will be addressed at the BRM, a BRM that might not even occur. In fact, if everyone listened to Microsoft and followed their advice then that would almost guarantee that no BRM would be held and no NB’s comments would be adopted.

The word for today is “disenfranchisement” which according to Webster’s means “to deprive of a franchise, of a legal right, or of some privilege or immunity.” You sometimes hear it used in connection with the policy in some U.S. states where convicted felons are not allowed to vote. That is legal disenfranchisement.

There is also the less savory kind of disenfranchisement, the kind that borders on electoral fraud. For example, in the 2004 presidential election there were reports of activities like:

• In Ohio, some registered voters received anonymous phone calls telling them that they were not properly registered to vote and that if they tried to vote they will be arrested.
• In Florida, registered members of one political party received phone calls reminding them to vote on November 3rd. Too bad the election was really on November 2nd.
• In Wisconsin, fliers were handed out falsely stating “If you already voted in any election this year, you can’t vote in the Presidential Election.”

An attempt to fraudulently disenfranchise a voter is despicable wherever it occurs. In a democracy we decide by having a fair debate, and then counting votes. But misrepresenting the rules and procedures in order to prevent another party from exercising their right to vote — this is universally deplored.

I just received an email from someone in a national standards committee considering the OOXML ballot, concerning false information given to his committee which suggested the Sept. 2nd ballot deadline was not real, that they actually had 30 more days to decide. I’m not going to name names in this post, but I will say that this isn’t the first note I’ve received regarding such tactics. Some of the other ploys I’ve heard of include:

• In the 3o-day contradiction period, one NB was told that the stated deadline from ISO had been extended and that they actually had two more weeks to debate before sending in their response. If they had listened to this advice, this NB would have missed the deadline and their comments would have been disregarded.
• Another NB was told that they were not allowed to vote in the 5-month ballot because they had not participated in the contradiction period. This is totally false and has no basis in JTC1 Directives or past practice. Luckily this NB decided to check the facts for themselves.
• Several NB’s were told that JTC1 had resolved all contradiction concerns with OOXML and that these issues therefore cannot be raised again in the 5-month ballot. This is utterly false. No one at JTC1 has made such a determination.
• Several NB’s have been asked not to submit comments to JTC1 at all, but to send them directly to Ecma. (Yeah, right. Just sign your absentee ballot and give it to me. I’ll make sure it gets in the mail)
• Many NB’s are being asked to throw away their right to a conditional approval position by voting Approval on a specification that they believe is full of defects that must be fixed, even though JTC1 Directives clearly states that “Conditional approval should be submitted as a disapproval vote.”
• Many NB’s are being persuaded to vote Approval with the promise that all of their comments will be “addressed at the BRM” without explaining that “addressing a comment” may entail little more than entering it in a Disposition of Comments Reports with the remark “No action taken”.

I’m expecting that such shenanigans are only going to increase as we go into the final week of this 5-month ballot. So I ask you all to remain vigilant. If you see anything like the above happening, then please post a comment. If you feel like you’ve been tricked into not voting, or voting for something that you didn’t really agree with, then remember that JTC1 allows an NB to change their vote up until Sept. 2nd. No vote is final until then. If you hear something that seems unusual or a departure from normal practice, then question it. And don’t take my word for it either. If you need an official answer, shoot off an email to the JTC1 Secretariat and the ISO Secretary General.

ISO works on a voting principle of one country/one vote. Don’t let confusion over proper voting procedures deprive your country of their vote.

If you are a regular reader of this blog, or almost any other blog covering the file format battle, then you have certainly come across comments from Stephane Rodriguez. He brings a unique perspective, knowing more about the legacy binary Excel formats than any sane person I know. So it a treat to have from Stephane a fuller exposition of some problems he ran into working with the Microsoft OOXML formats, in an technical article called Microsoft Office XML Formats? Defective by Design.

Enjoy!

27 August Update: Slashdot has further coverage of Stephane’s article. Some good comments and perspectives can be read there.