page_title: Standardization of Office Open XML
section_title: Complaints about the national bodies process
hierarchical_section_title: Standardization of Office Open XML / Reactions to standardization / Complaints about the national bodies process
caption_attribution_description: English: Office Open XML ISO standardization protest in Bangalore, India
context_page_description: The Office Open XML file formats were standardised between December 2006 and November 2008, first by the Ecma International consortium, and subsequently, after a contentious standardization process, by the ISO/IEC's Joint Technical Committee 1.
context_section_description: There have been allegations that the ISO ballot process for Office Open XML was marred with voting irregularities and heavy-handed tactics by some stakeholders.
  An Ars Technica article sources Groklaw stating that at Portugal's national body TC meeting, "representatives from Microsoft attempted to argue that Sun Microsystems, the creators and supporters of the competing OpenDocument format (ODF), could not be given a seat at the conference table because there was a lack of chairs."
  In Sweden, Microsoft notified the Swedish Standards Institute (SIS) that an employee sent a memo to two of its partners, requesting them to join the SIS committee and vote in favor of Office Open XML in return for "marketing contributions". Jason Matusow, a Director in the Corporate Standards Strategy Team at Microsoft, stated that the memo was the action of an individual employee acting outside company policy, and that the memo was retracted as soon as it was discovered. SIS have since changed its voting procedure so that a member has to actually participate before being allowed to vote.
  Sweden invalidated its vote (80% was for approval) as one company cast more than one vote, which is against SIS policy.
  Finnish IT journalists described that meeting as raising strong differences in opinions.
  In Switzerland, SNV registered a vote of "approval with comments," and there was some criticism about a "conflict of interest" regarding the chairman of the UK 14 sub-committee, who did not allow discussion of licensing, economic and political arguments. In addition, the chairman of the relevant SNV parent committee is also the secretary general of Ecma International, which approved OOXML as a standard. Further complaints regarded "committee stuffing", which is however allowed by present SNV rules, and non-adherence to SNV rules by the UK 14 chairman, which resulted in a re-vote with the same result.
  Australia's national standards body, Standards Australia, was criticized for its handling of the OOXML process by the New Zealand Open Source Society, the open source advisory firm Waugh Partners, Australian National University Professor Roger Clarke, OASIS lawyer Andrew Updegrove, IBM and Google. Standards Australia sent ISO SC 34 expert and XML and Schematron specialist Rick Jelliffe to the BRM, despite critics alleging that Jelliffe would not represent the views of those opposing the standardization. Jelliffe had previously been in the news after being offered payment by Microsoft to improve incorrect Wikipedia articles about Office Open XML. Microsoft had bought a schema conversion tool from his company and he had performed the initial conversion of the Office Open XML schemas from XML Schemas to RELAX NG, both schema languages he had been involved in standardizing. It was alleged that Standards Australia had broken a previous public pledge to send two internal employees to the BRM. However Standards Australia issued a press release denying this and stating that the Computerworld article was "riddled with inaccuracies and misrepresentations."
  Norway's vote was decided by Standard Norge; the mostly opposing viewpoints of the technical committee resulted in a disapproval vote in the 2007 ballot. However, the administration of Standard Norge changed Norway's vote to "approval" in 2008 even if the majority of the committee argued in favor of keeping its "disapproval" vote. Membership in the technical committee had risen from 6–7 to 30 members; all of the pre-OOXML members argued in favour of a "no" vote. In October 2008, 13 of the 23 members, 12 of which are associated with the open-source movement, resigned after OOXML was ratified by ISO and all appeals were rejected.
  The IDABC community programme (which is managed by the European Commission) runs the "Open Source Observatory" which is "dedicated to Free/Libre/Open Source Software."  Via its "Open Source News", it has reported on reports which criticize the standardization process.
  It states that the German IT news site Heise reports that in Germany, two opponents of Office Open XML, Deutsche Telekom and G
caption: Office Open XML ISO standardization protest in Bangalore, India.
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