Open Malaysia

Pic: 15 kg, 2 boxes, 6039 pages of OOXML specs

Much excitement has gone on since I wrote Do we need two ISO standards for document format? - Part 2 in December 2006.

Ecma submitted the Ecma-approved Microsoft Office OpenXML (OOXML)  standard to ISO for "fast track" standardization. By 5 Feb 2007 after a 30-day review before the real fast track 5 months balloting by countries, National Bodies had the opportunity to submit to ISO any contradictions.

Malaysia spoke up! Malaysia was one of 20 countries who sent comments of contradiction to ISO. Technically, out of the 20, that's 17 P Countries out of 30 -- and that's a big percentage. So the math says, "If 11 P-Countries vote against OOXML during the 5-month ballot, then OOXML will fail."

We wait for Ecma to respond to ISO by 28 Feb 2007, after which we will publicly see all the 20 countries' comments and  Ecma's response.

On 7 February 2007, Dr. Nah Soo Hoe and I spoke at CICC's Asia OSS Workshop in Kuala Lumpur in the session on "Open protocols, Standards and Content & Open document Format (ODF)". Dr. Nah presented on open standards (click here for pdf) and I took on ODF (click here for pdf). We generated some excitement in the audience by relating the past month's events related to the OOXML contradictions.

A participant from Singapore asked how we see the future of multiple standards -- I responded with a dream, a wish that OOXML will merge or harmonize with ODF, just like the Chinese UOF standard is.

In the meantime, don't print the Ecma OOXML pages! Ecma has changed them, and may still keep on changing them, so I'm stuck with 15 kg of wrong page numbers and changed contents!