01 May 2007

Has IBM annexed the Kenyan ISO National body ?

During the 30-day contradictions period in the ISO standardization proces 20 countries responded several of which were concerns about the OOXML fasttrack standardisation procedure and also a few a view with an already positive stance on the format. About 6 of the reponses also contained negative responses on the format itself raising several specific issues with the format specifications.

When reading trough the a lot of those issues raised by the national bodies a lot of the issues seem to be directly related to stories written down by IBM's Rob Weir and OASIS laywer Andy Updegrove. Also it seems like several of the reactions by the national bodies have almost identical issues raised in almost identical sentencing. It might look like a lot of the issues are cwritten by the same people or copied from them.

A strange development in this is that in the Kenyan response to ISO the author seems to be an IBM employee from Germany who is also representing IBM in the German ISO national body (DIN). http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2007/04/20/a-few-updates-on-the-openxml-formats.aspx . The 'Kenyan' response is the most extensive of of the ISO national body reponses and mayby not surprisingly contains a lot of the issues that were before raised by IBM's Rob Weir.

This is all the more surprising as it seems that the German IBM employees also activly tried to persuade the German DIN committe to write a negative response to ISO.
http://www.ictstandardization.com/news/200704/article20070406.html

The question is then how the IBM issues written by IBM germanies DIN member that were not raised in the German response have seemed to end up in the Kenyan response.
Is the Kenyan ISO national body easier to 'influence' by IBM .... ????