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The Microsoft-Stacked SC 34 Committee Makes a Move

By Pamela Jones et al.

Guess what the SC 34 committee, the ISO/IEC committee responsible for OOXML, is up to now? I call it a takeover attempt of ODF, according to my reading of the published notes of the most recent meeting held yesterday, October 1st, and starring a document titled "Request to JTC 1 for alignment of OASIS and JTC 1 Maintenance Procedures." Uh oh. That sounds polite, but it is what it is. An attempted coup. They have already sent a "Liaison Statement" to OASIS. Surrender or else, what? SC 34 asks JTC 1 "to establish with OASIS a synchronised mechanism for maintenance of ISO/IEC 26300 and to inform SC 34 of the outcome." I gather they think they can do a better job of maintaining ODF than OASIS. What will JTC 1 do, do you think? You doubt they will hop on to this wonderful plan?

I gather the hope is, if the takeover were to succeed, that SC 34 would get to maintain ODF as well as Microsoft's competing parody "standard," OOXML. How totally smooth and shark-like. Under the guise of "synchronised maintenance", without which they claim SC 34 can't fulfill its responsibilities, they get control of everything. So utterly Microsoft. Microsoft yearns for interoperability, it seems. More like yearning for ODF's air supply to be ... well, you know. Microsoft never seems to change, does it? Yoo hoo! EU Commission! Are you watching? You can read all the public resolutions of the ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 34 Plenary Meeting, 2008-10-01, held in Jeju, Republic of Korea. It will either make you laugh or throw up. I did both. Sequentially.

Full post as published by Groklaw on October 02, 2008 (boomark / email).