[NLnet Press] Investor NLnet again calls Microsoft for more openness

[NLnet foundation press list]

NLnet again calls Microsoft for more openness
"Non-disclosure will hurt standardisation OOXML"

     American software vendor Microsoft announced this week under
     pressure from the market that the company will be publishing some
     of its documentation on the specifications from its older, binary
     file formats next month [1]. It persists in not providing a direct
     mapping of its new OOXML format to those same formats. NLnet
     foundation, a societal investor and member of the ECMA TC45 that is
     led by Microsoft, is much dissatisfied with Microsoft's lack of
     cooperation in both areas.

"It is too little, too late. This is old stuff that is vastly incomplete
and totally illegible. Anybody wanting to read his own documents in
another application is dependant on lots of reverse engineering by
someone, as these documents are just the tip of the iceberg", states
Michiel Leenaars, strategy manager at NLnet and member of the
Netherlands mirror committee for ISO/JTC1 SC34.

The foundation points to the similarities with the SMB-case where after
five years of lawsuits Microsoft was forced by the European Commission
to release 15.000 pages of information to its competitors - about a
technically much simpler specification than OOXML. NLnet thinks that
this time the market will not wait, because Microsoft has a much weaker
position that its uncooperative behaviour now assumes. "The lack of
respect of Microsoft for the interests of its customers is actually
hurting Microsoft itself the most. You would think they would want to
shun any more controversy around OOXML if it is to become an ISO
archiving standard." The foundation thinks that the national standards
bodies - that explicitly requested the different binary file formats to
be released in time for them to take along with their analysis of the
dispositions - are in for a suprise and that the documentation will only
confuse people.

"Why publication had to wait until after the dispositions were
published, is unclear. The direct demand from the national bodies has
been known by Microsoft at least five months ago," says Leenaars. This
leaves national bodies one week after publication by Microsoft to read
yet another stack of documents on top of the many thousands of pages of
dispositions that were released last monday by ECMA that also need to be
reviewed comment by comment.

"Surely noone in the world of standards wants to rubberstamp an untested
proposal that is built on ghost file formats of the past not still
available to them", says Leenaars. "OOXML was meant to be compatible
with something very specific, but does not contain a single reference to
any of the documentation that Microsoft will be publishing - not one
reference. How can you claim any kind of scrutiny then?"

The foundation is therefore sceptical about the chances for OOXML within
ISO if Microsoft persists, which will be a big threath to the viablity
of OOXML as an archiving standard as a whole. OOXML's role in the market
as archiving standard for older Microsoft-Office generated files can
also be assumed by the much more versatile Open Document Format (ISO
26300 [3]), an established ISO-standard for new Office files that is
broadly supported by important players like Google, IBM, Sun
Microsystems, OpenOffice.org and the open source community, as well as
governments like The Netherlands, Norway and South-Africa.

[1]
http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2008/01/16/mapping-documents-in-the-binary-format-doc-xls-ppt-to-the-open-xml-format.aspx

[2] http://nlnet.nl, see also below.

[3]
http://www.iso.org/iso/en/CatalogueDetailPage.CatalogueDetail?CSNUMBER=43485

*** Note to editors

This press release is also available at:

                 http://nlnet.nl/press/20080118-formats.html

Media contacts:

Michiel Leenaars
Strategy Manager NLnet
+31 6 27 050 947
m.leenaars at nlnet.nl

About NLnet Foundation

NLnet Foundation is a widely respected private charity fund supporting
open standards and open source worldwide, and has over the years
actively contributed to (internet) standards, open source projects and
subsidiary or enabling activities such as the development of GPLv3.
NLnet foundation is an independent organisation whose means came
initially from interest on a very substantial own capital formed in 1997
by the sale of the first Dutch Internet Service Provider. Its private
capital ensures an absolute independent position. The articles of
association for the NLnet foundation state: "to promote the exchange of
electronic information and all that is related or beneficial to that
purpose". NLnet believes in open standards and open source. At the
moment, dozens of projects and organizations are supported financially.
Amongst them: research laboratory NLnet Labs, the Free Software
Foundation, ThinkQuest, Intelligent Interactive Distributed Systems, and
the Internet Society.

More info: http://nlnet.nl

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