This past Tuesday the Romanian committee debated and voted over the OOXML issue, and the result remained 'Yes' as in September. Back then there were 12 committee members and the Yes/No/Abstain breakdown was 10:1:1 . This week 26 members voted, 13 of them joined the committee in the past two weeks, and even if almost all of the new members prominently feature the MS Partner logo on their websites the result was a much more balanced 15:6:5 . The debate was a relatively moderate argument between MS, a MS partner and three of us opposed to the fast track process. Many of the other members were probably waiting for it all to end, so we could vote and go home :) Can't blame them, it's not like they were interested or knowledgeable about the topic.

The ASRO rules state that only if consensus is reached should a final decision be made, but there's no clear rule to determine what to vote in such cases. An Abstain would have been much more logical, but it's up to them to decide.

For many more details in English check this blog, while Romanian readers can check out this one.


While I agree with the 'let's make free software better' part of Miguel's blog post I think he downplays the role of activism and non-development side of FOSS. It's not OOXML per se that people are pissed off by, but the nontransparent, often corrupt and hurried process by which it is being pushed along and which in turn will affect FOSS - bug count, codebase size, compatibility issues and user confusion to name a few.

As a somewhat stretched analogy: Miguel, how about instead of you criticizing the Bush administration and their cohorts, and praising Kucinich, Gravel, Paul or Obama you just accept whatever the mainstream media produces without a word, and run for Congress yourself? 'start walking' as you say in your post :) (nb: from what I read on Miguel's blog I agree with his political views)

There needs to be awareness among non-technical users of the implications of software and data freedom or else we're simply left with 'open source'.

Today, four days earlier than the rest of the world, we have held a small event attended by about 20 people including a local TV crew to celebrate the first Document Freedom Day. Adi and I gave two short presentations on open standards and their benefits, document formats, ODF , OOXML and the latter's ongoing and embarrassing standardization process. Even if OOXML is labeled 'Open Standard' soon by ISO, we're determined to continue the campaign of raising awareness and trying to educate the Romanian public about the merits of opennes and true interoperability.

A brief intro for those unfamiliar with the subject:

Microsoft is pushing to get their new office document format, "Office Open XML" better known as OOXML, through the ISO fast track process in order to get it approved as an open standard.
This is increasingly a requirement from national governments that realized that data should be open and vendor independent. However there is a lot of criticism concerning both the OOXML specification and the process by which it is being promoted.

In September 2007, albeit by a small margin, OOXML failed to receive the percentage of votes required to approve it as a standard. The process was extended until March 2008 during which period comments of the national committees were analyzed and responded to by ECMA (where OOXML was already accepted), a meeting was held in Geneva at the end of February to modify the original spec based on some of these comments and national committees given a chance to change their votes from September in either direction during March.

In Romania the spec got a "Yes, without comments" in September, as explained later by some committee members due to confusion about the voting options and lack of much interest, since the committee's main area of focus is keyboard maps, character encodings and language support . So there was no foul play involved as it was in some other countries.

After the vote, during the past 6 months there has been a heated debate on a local mailing list about the topic, with the majority of those who expressed their opinion being against the acceptance of OOXML as a fast track standard. The major concerns raised were those written up on noooxml.org and odfalliance.org, in short technical ambiguities caused by the burden of introducing support for legacy MSOffice format quirks, insufficiently clear assurance from a legal pov, faulty process and lack of time to carefully review and improve on the ~7000 page long spec which is not even implemented in MS Office (what they propose for standardization now has quite a few changes since the previous version and the ones deployed in MSOffice 2007 installs)

Besides those of the Microsoft representative who is the ISV evangelist for Romania, there were no coherent arguments in favor of OOXML, with close to 10 people on the other side of the fence criticizing the spec and warning about the consequences of it being adopted.

After seeing that there is little chance of initiating a public discussion on the subject since the media is unaware or unwilling to touch it, two of us on the list got our small FOSS companies into the committee. The discussions on the mailing list proved that if arguments are researched and clearly presented some of those who had doubts and siding with OOXML are willing to change their minds.

The date of the local vote is not yet set by ASRO (Romanian Standards Organization) which apparently gives plenty of time to other companies to subscribe.

Today four have joined the committee, all of them seem to be MS partners (Fujitsu-Siemens is one of them, the others are local software companies). The sad thing is that these companies or people have not shown interest in the subject so far, have not participated in the 6 months online debate but are probably going to cast their vote in favor of OOXML . What they are doing is perfectly legal, after all anyone can join the committe, but it's sad to see attempts at public debate and the chances of it changing something getting offset by throwing money at the problem at the last minute.

I'll keep an update on how things are progressing and the results and details of the vote when it happens.

Understandably most governments will have no excuse of not choosing MSOffice and OOXML in future deployments when the lobbying resources of that camp are no longer countered by the fact that so far only ODF is an accepted ISO standard for office document formats. And that will be a setback for Linux desktops where a truly free and 100% compatible implementation of OOXML is unlikely to be available soon.