On Wednesday of last week, the International Standards Organization (ISO) officially announced that Open XML is now an ISO standard, increasing choice among document formats and ensuring international control over this popular format.
The win for Open XML wasn’t a narrow one, either. Only ten countries voted against ratification, whereas 61 countries wanted to make Open XML a standard.
As somebody who was very active in the Romanian standardization body, I’m therefore extremely disappointed that some groups opposed to the ratification of Open XML are continuing their smear campaign against the format and against the national bodies that supported it.
For months, these groups have launched vicious personal attacks against anybody who dares to not share their views. And now those who are unhappy with Open XML’s adoption as an ISO standard are attacking national bodies, challenging their independence from Microsoft. If you read the postings on noooxml.org or Groklaw, you would think that no one could possibly be for Open XML without being bribed or manipulated. The way Open XML’s opponents seek to kill off any kind of honest debate about the issues gives me a strange feeling of deja-vu – am I the only one being reminded of Soviet tactics here??
In fact, Open XML’s opponents have gone so far that Jan van den Beld, the former Secretary General of ECMA and a long time member of the standards community, felt compelled today to publish a blog post asking Open XML’s opponents – specifically those involved with Groklaw and noooxml.org – to stop their destructive campaign against ISO and national standards bodies
Mr. van den Beld is right in telling Open XML’s opponents that they are going too far. And he is also right to point out that it is really ironic that IBM is the one fanning the flames. After all, IBM recruited partners and others to join standards bodies in Argentina, Belgium, Croatia, Italy, Norway, and Serbia, among others. And IBM lobbied government officials in Barbados, Canada, Germany, Hungary, Malaysia, and Mexico, among others. And, ironically in light of its accusations of irregularities in various national standards bodies, IBM sought to change the voting procedures in its favor in Croatia, Germany, and Japan.
And that’s just the legal stuff they did.
In various instances, IBM crossed the line into what appears to be illegal behavior; for example when Avi Alkalay, who describes himself as “an Open Standards, Open Source and Linux advisor at IBM Brazil in Brazil” called for a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack on openxmlcommunity.org. I never thought I’d see the day when an IBM advisor officially came out in favor of cybercrime. But then, we know that Uncle Joe and his followers weren’t exactly squeamish either.
I hope Open XML’s opponents will stop embarrassing themselves by acting like a little boy who has chocolate fudge all over his face but claims his sister ate the cake. Seriously, guys. It’s time to move on and start doing constructive things again.
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