M$ is lobbying heavily in Bureau of Indian Standards(BIS) for valued Vote (India is a P-Member in ISO) in ISO/IEC JTC1 which is the International Standardization body of Information Technology standards. Dr. Nagarjuna is active in the campaign representing ODFAlliance & Free Software Foundation of India. The history of Discussion is archived at ODF aliance.

Why we are Opposing ECMA Office Open XML. a A lot of a lot of answers are in front of us. Technical, Political & More Technical...
Free Software community Suceeded in setting up Vendor independent De-codable Interoperable Public Standard called Open Document format. It is also approved by ISO26300 as an ISO standard (May 2006) .Microsoft denied to become a part of the OASIS Open document team and created a new 6000 page specification named ECMA Open XML , which is open Only on Name and applied for ISO recognition.It is now under the Fast Track Process & all standardization Bodies need to Vote on It. You can see a File format Timeline here. Common Interoperable Decodable Public standards ( called as Free Standards/ Open standards)always created a revolution in The history of Digital age. Look at the examples of HTML, Unicode etc. A dual standard adds costs, uncertainty and confusion to industry, government and citizens and deny the growth.

One of the Strongest Argument Raised By G.Nagrjuna in his paper, submitted to Working Committee, Board of Indian Standards on Wordprocessing is as Follows

In Ecma’s response document the truth of the matter comes out very vividly:

OpenXML is designed to represent the existing corpus of documents faithfully, even if that means preserving idiosyncrasies that one might not choose given the luxury of starting from a clean slate. In the ODF design, compatibility with and preservation of existing Office documents were not goals. Each set of goals is valuable; sacrificing either at the expense of the other may not be in the best interest of users. (p.6 Ecma Response)

This is the fact of the matter. This clearly shows that one of them is trying to preserve the existing data created by a single vendor, while the other is to provide a generic encoding standard for office documents. It is true therefore that their purposes are different. Since there is a difference in purpose despite the overlapping with ODF, Ecma argues, OOXML can also exist with ODF.

But the issue is: providing a way of preserving a vendor’s old documents is the service that a vendor is expected to do. This must happen. This can happen by converting the documents into ODF. Ecma did not prove that this is impossible.

We therefore think, that Ecma has the burden to prove that proprietary documents made by them cannot be converted into ODF. It is very likely that there can be a few elements that cannot be translated, since ODF was not made to serve a particular vendor’s requirements. Once such elements are identified, Ecma can propose a model of extending ODF so that the possible problems are sorted out. This is the desirable way.

The Technical Problems of OOXML are Very High I request you to Go Through G.Nagarjuna’s paper Titled Why Ecma OOXML cannot be regarded as a free/open document standard?


The later Discussions on OOXML at BIS is Featured in Groklaw

we find answers from Microsoft’s Vijay Kapur, followed by responses from Dr. Nagarjuna in this fact Shet

For example, here’s one such exchange:

Backward compatibility for all vendors: Can any third party regardless of business model, without access to additional information and without the cooperation of Microsoft implement full backward compatibility and conversion of such legacy documents into MS-OOXML comparable to what Microsoft can offer?Mr V. Kapur: Implementing backward compatibility is an application function not a file format specification requirement. The ECMA 376 specification is capable of faithfully representing information in the legacy binary file formats. This point was treated in detail in the response to the question raised by Dr. Nagarjuna. Microsoft can offer? Availability of Binary File Formats –
It is to be noted that Microsoft has made the .doc, .xls, and .ppt binary file format specifications available under a royalty-free covenant not to sue to anyone who wishes to implement all or part of these specifications in their products. Anyone can get access to the specification now, using the method
described in the following Knowledgebase article at the link: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/840817 - How to extract information from Office files by using Office file formats and schemas (relevant extract below)With both format specifications being available for a developer, a converter can be written in such a way that a DOC or XLS document can be converted into an Open XML document with content and representation intact. This point should be treated as closed as there is no contradiction.

Dr. Nagarjuna: Availability of the specification of binary formats does not solve the problem of another vendor’s ability to implement. What is required is a mapping between the existing proprietary formats and OOXML if the stated objective of OOXML, namely, to faithfully

represent legacy formats in XML is to be met. The link provided by MS is not an article. It is misleading to say so. MS did not publish the specification of proprietary documents at any accessible place. They are promising to provide to those who sign an MOU with the company. This is unacceptable since, implementing this standard mandates the need for private understandings. That is not the purpose for which standards are specified. They are specified precisely to eliminate such a requirement. The question asked was a very serious and a CORE issue: the answer given is not satisfactory. A satisfactory answer to this consists in publishing the mapping between OOXML and proprietary documents. Since this is not the case, the issue is open, and forms a sufficient reason to vote against OOXML.

I request all of You to write to BIS to take a Decision to vote against OOXML in ISO. The current issue sheet is available here. Similar Campaigns are Happening in various Countries now.

There are Updates from Massachusetts, South Africa, Japan, Portugal, Spain etc. It Failed to get approval even in USA. South Africa TC Rejects OOXML 13 to 4

So Say No To Microsoft Office Broken Format OOXML .
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