Let’s leave it open

In democracies, private companies and citizens are of course free to choose between products and services based on proprietary standards or open standards. Governments on the other hand have a responsibility to ensure that all citizens have equal and perpetual access to the state’s digital infrastructure. In other words, citizens should not be forced to pirate or purchase software in order to interact with the state. This is only possible if the state employs open standards thus giving equal access to users of proprietary and free software. In the last couple of years, many countries have formalised this preference for open standards in various policy pronouncements.

These policy developments and the rise of a competing open standard finally convinced Microsoft to develop and adopt Office Open XML (OOXML) as the default format for Office 2007. The competing open standard for electronic documents is Open Document Format (ODF) originally developed by Sun Microsystems.

Since ODF had already been approved by the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) in May 2006, Microsoft moved quickly. First, it had OOXML approved as an Ecma standard on December 7, 2006. Then Ecma, with Microsoft’s support, submitted OOXML to the ISO for fast-track approval. In September 2007, OOXML missed its first chance for ISO approval because it secured only 17 out of 32 votes, five votes short of what was necessary. As per ISO procedure, a ballot resolution meeting was held this February to give the national board an opportunity to apply changes to the standard and also change the September voting positions. The final outcome of the fast-track process will be announced by the end of this month.