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International Standards Organisation (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) in Geneva have postponed the publication of the revised specification of Microsoft's Office Open XML (OOXML) document format, following complaints filed by their member organizations representing these four countries: Brazil, India, South Africa and Venezuela.

The planned standard ISO/IEC DIS 29500 cannot be published until the complaints are examined by ISO and IEC who will have to give responses and comments by the end of June 2008

The four national standardization organizations have shown concerns that no consensus has been reached on changes that must be made to the 6000-page specification, during the consultation period on the numerous comments submitted at the end of February. The complaints mainly address the fact that the concrete technical objections were not individually discussed.

The concerns are summarized in an open letter of a member of the technical standardisation committee in India who stated that the standard had not been properly thought out and it was not even clear what standard would result from the proceedings. The adoption of the standard in the present state would not be an open process as it would be implemented only by Microsoft.

Other protests have been filed to ISO by the Danish Open Source Business Association. They claim that "the procedures and the decision conflict with ISO's rules, and the process has caused considerable damage to the reputations of Danish Standards and ISO." The letter also explains why the case should be picked up by ISO: "The process has thus been formally annulled now for two months - since March 29, at which time the specifications should have been sent to the national standardization organizations. The prerequisites for the fast-track procedure no longer exist, and, therefore, I expect that ISO recommence the case."

The European Commission is also investigating the case. Competition Commissioner Kroes explained in a recent conference why the European Commission is interested in this topic: "If voting in the standard-setting context is influenced less by the technical merits of the technology but rather by side agreements, inducements, package deals, reciprocal agreements or commercial pressure, then these risk falling foul of the competition rules."

In the meantime, The Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS), has invited interested parties to create a new technical committee for the "implementation, interoperability, and conformity" of the next version of the Open Document Format (ODF) which has already been certified by the ISO.

Open source supporters draw the attention on a possible new alliance with Microsoft which announced its intention to support ODF and to join the technical OASIS committee in its works on the open standard.

The management boards of ISO and IEC will decide, after having examined the complaints against Microsoft standard, whether the appeals should be further processed and if they decide so, the chairmen of the two boards will establish a conciliation panel that will try to resolve the appeals.

ISO puts standard for Microsoft's OOXML document formats on hold (10.06.2008)
http://www.heise-online.co.uk/news/ISO-puts-standard-for-Microsoft-s-O...

Four national standards bodies appeal against approval of ISO/IEC DIS 29500 (6.06.2008)
http://www.iso.org/iso/pressrelease.htm?refid=Ref1136

Now an OOXML Protest from Denmark's OSL - Updated 3Xs: Official English Translation (31.05.2008)
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20080531134006167

OASIS opens discussion list for ODF Implementation, Interoperability and Conformance (3.06.2008)
http://opendocument.xml.org/news/oasis-opens-discussion-list-for-odf-i...

Microsoft will support Open Document Format (ODF) (22.05.2008)
http://www.heise-online.co.uk/news/Microsoft-will-support-Open-Documen...

EDRi-gram: OOXML adopted as a new standard by ISO (9.04.2008)
http://www.edri.org/edrigram/number6.7/ooxml-adopted-iso