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 .... ????

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

IBM has become so sleazy in all this. And they keep saying choice is bad:
http://www.sutor.com/newsite/blog-open/?p=1564

God forbid anyone would use OXML just because THEY want to, even if IBM recommends something less convenient.

I think the other Kenya comment is from the guy in Malaysia, right?

The Wraith said...

I see the name in this blog
http://yoonkit.blogspot.com/
but it could be anyone as I have no idea on how common this name is.

Anonymous said...

Of course IBM will kill OOXML. And all other will support them because MS crossed the line of good behaviour. We saw how they treated the EU in the antitrust suit, we saw how they fought against European developers for software patents. We don't want a patented OOXML standard with a fake indemnification.

The Wraith said...

@anonymous

As this is the first time that Microsoft actually waives their patent rights to everbody for a major fileformat in their productline it is actually a very significant step towards lessening the influence of patentrights.
As anybody including OSS developers are able to freely use a major Microsoft format it created a situation opposite from the anti-trust suit where Microsoft did not open their formats.
Therefore I find it a strange argument to use against this format as I think the EU will see the opening up of MS proprety formats to the rest of the world as a big step in the right direction for Microsoft.

And IBM frankly has only one concern and that is not the quality or size or openness of OOXML but the fact that they invested heavily in making their new Office product line fully ODF capable and they hope to capitalize by blocking or hindering the adoption of the new MS Office 2007 productline that supports OOXML.

Anonymous said...

"And IBM frankly has only one concern and that is not the quality or size or openness of OOXML ..."

No, IBM has certainly more than one concern. And regardless of IBMs interests, the quality, size and lack of openesss you pointed out are exactly the things preventing OOXML to become a relevant standard ever - regardless of the outcome of the ISO certification.

Currently, this whole theater is only about how much the international standard organisations are willing to make fools of themselves and showing how corrupt they are, thereby weaking the importance of ODF as a true standard.

J said...

IBM annexed the Kenyan ISO body.

No one has annexed the Kenyan ISO Body.

If anything, Microsoft has been rather manipulative IMHO since some of the member of the KEBS (Kenyans standard body) committee debating on the OOXML standard apparently were influenced being Microsoft Partners.

Anyhow on Kenya's OOXML vote..

Some links of interest chronologically:

http://blog.josiahmugambi.com/2007/08/kenya-votes-in-favour-of-emcamicrosofts.html

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/032808-kenya-abstains-from-ooxml.html

and

http://blog.josiahmugambi.com/2008/03/kenyan-abstains-from-voting-on-ooxml.html

-