Maybe i spoke to soon. This just came in from ISO, the resignation letter of the SC34WG1 Chairman who has completed his three year term.
There is a fascinating statement at the end of the Martin Bryan letter. "The disparity of rules for PAS, Fast-Track and ISO committee generated standards is fast making ISO a laughing stock in IT circles. The days of open standards development are fast disappearing. Instead we are getting “standardization by corporation”, something I have been fighting against for the 20 years I have served on ISO committees. I am glad to be retiring before the situation becomes impossible..."
When corporations join open standards or open source efforts, they arrive with substantial but most welcome financial and expert resources. They also bring marketshare and presence. And, they bring business objectives. They have a plan.
As long as the corporate plan is aligned with the open standards - open source community work, all is fine. In fact it's great. For sure though there will come a time when the corporate plan asserts it's direction, and there is possible conflict. At this point, the very same wealth of resources that were cause for celebration can become cause for disappointment and disaster.
One of the more troubling things i've noticed is that corporations treat everything as a corporate asset to be traded, bartered and dealt for shareholder advantage and value. This includes patents and interoperability issues which not surprisingly are wrapped into open standards and open source efforts. Rather than embrace the humanitarian – community of shared interest drivers of open standards and open source, corporations naturally plot to get maximum value out of the resources they commit.
A primary example of this is Sun's use of OpenOffice, ODF, and an anti trust settlement disaster that left them at the mercy of Microsoft.
Gary Edwards (342)
marbux (24)
Jesper Lund Stocholm (9)
mazyar hedayat (4)
Will ISO follow either the AFNOR or Brittish proposals to merge ODF and OOXML? I think so. If they continue on their current path of big vendor sponsored document wars, ISO will beocme irrelevant. Sooner or later the ISO National Bodies must take back the standards process from corporate corruption and influence.
One thing is clear. Neither Microsoft or IBM is about to compromise. IBM has had many chances to improve ODF's interoperability with Microsoft Office and the Office documents, but has been steadfast in their stubborn refusal to concede an inch.
Microsoft hides behind their legacy installed base of over 550 million MSOffice desktops. There simply isn't a pragmatic or cost effective way of transitioning the installed base to ODF without either seriously re writing and replacing those applications, or, changing ODF to be compatible.
The marketplace is clear on what they intend on doing. Pragmatism will rule. Productivity trumps standards initiatives whenever they are out of sink.
In the face of this clear marketplace intent, one would think IBM might compromise on ODF. No way! They are intent on using ODF to force a market wide rip out and replace of MSOffice.
Most people assume that there are two opposing groups at war here; the Microsoft OOXML group vs. the IBM ODF group. This isn't an accurate view at all. There is a third, middle group of developers working the treacherous space of conversion - the no man'sland between OOXML MSOffice and ODF OpenOffice.
The conversion group know the problems involved, and are actually trying to dliver marketplace facing solutions. The vendors of course are in this war to the bitter end, and could care less about the damage they cause to end users.
It's also true that the conversion group seeks to bridge desktop productivity into the larger, highly interoeprable web platform.
It's also possible that ISO will chose to merge ODF and OOXML, as proposed by the French AFNOR plan as well as by the British. To do this they must first remove entirely the coproarate vendor influence of Ecma and OASIS, and perfect the merger entirely at ISO. The big vendors will of course fully oppose this approach.
My post just happened to coincide with ISO Governor Mark Bryan's "Standardization by Corporations" letter where he expresses a derpressing but nevertheless very true concern.
In fact, the OpenDocument Foundation was created specifically to address our concerns about the undue influence big application vendors were exerting on ODF following the April 30th, 2005 approval of ODF 1.0 (which went on to become ISO 26300).
~ge~