Ø  ISO standardization means passing the control of the format to an organization where countries of the world are taking the final decision

Ø  ODF came from OASIS and Open XML from ECMA international (who took Microsoft's spec and involved other vendors - IBM is a member of ECMA). ECMA & OASIS are standards organizations where commercial companies are playing an important role. That’s why ISO standards are so important for the public good: they are made by countries

Ø  Since in Kenya there are many users of MS Office documents (and think of it even differently - with piracy of 82%, it means 82% of these users didn’t purchase the product), both legal and illegal users are the ultimate beneficiaries as Open XML allows backward compatibility of that data into an Open format that can be accessed by anyone using a product that conforms to the standard. For Kenyan's to benefit, Open XML should be transferred to countries because only countries will manage it for the common good.

Ø  Those advocating a NO vote are basically implying that countries should not be involved and we don’t need our existing documents in a format that can be read/or created by any Kenya developer - including that OSS developer who can build products conforming to the standard. A trend has been set by the following countries and appropriate links provided for you to confirm. Key among them is Apple's iWorks 2008 which is a suite of Office productivity tools.

Other vendors and platforms using Open XML

·         Apple  iWorks 2008 support for Open XML http://www.apple.com/iwork/pages/#compatible This is on the Macintosh platform. Also on the iPhone – Apple iPhone users can view email attachments in the Open XML format.

·         Palm OS – Documents To Go brings Open XML support to smartphone and PDA devices powered by the Palm operating system.

·         iPhone – Apple iPhone users can view email attachments in the Open XML format.

·         MindMapping – Mindjet's MindManager allows you to follow the logical workflow of first brainstorming, then creating a document outline, and then writing a document. You can brainstorm your idea in MindManager, and then convert those into an Open XML document.

·         Java Developers –A project up sourceforge.net is creating a set of Java APIs to make programming against the Open XML formats much easier for Java developers.

·         Data Reporting – In Monarch V.9.0 from Datawatch users have the ability to create reports of their data using Open XML.

·         PDF – Altsoft XML2PDF server 2007 is a publishing and font management solution that publishes XML data from formats like Open XML into print ready formats like PDF and XPS.

·         Word and Character Counting on Mac – Word Counter 2.2.1 is a small plug-in application for the Mac OS X that supports a variety of file formats, including Open XML.

Ø  I am not surprised that it is a commercial company that is pushing for a NO vote. This is wrong.

Ø  That being said, a YES vote should not be a blind vote. Spot the deficiencies and required improvement and comment them. Then participate in the Ballot Resolution Meeting and make your point and get involved in SC34 to exert your control right.

Ø  There are translators that can convert from ODF and Open XML and that leaves the choice to the market as to what product/application to use.

Ø  There has been wide adoption of Open XML by application vendors from the list above. One should ask himself/herself why Apple Inc which is part of the ODF Alliance chose instead to implement Open XML in its new version of iWorks 2008??? See the plea to Apple by one of the IBM ODF proponents for Apple to consider implementing ODF - Makes for interesting read

Petition to Apple to support ODF in iWorks 2008

This just popped up via Google Alerts and digg: “Apple Support for Open Document Format.”

To:  Apple, Inc.

Dear Apple,

The ISO 26300 ( http://www.iso.org/iso/en/CatalogueDetailPage.CatalogueDetail?CSNUMBER=43485&scopelist= ) is the international standard XML format for office documents, also known as the Open Document Format or ODF. The newly released iWork '08 supports the Open Office XML (OOXML) document format, which is still not an ISO-approved standard. It would be beneficial to all if the iWork suite of applications, namely Pages, Keynote and Numbers, support Open Document Format.

We appeal that you release an update to the latest version of iWork suite to support ISO 26300. In addition, we hope that you support the ISO 26300 standard in future Apple products that involves office documents.

Thank you very much.

Sincerely,

The Undersigned

 

Open Standards

I conclude by stating the obvious: - ISO Standards can be revised at any point by member countries.

Standards are created to cater for different needs and choice is always good for the consumer. There could be a little confusion between Open standards and Open Source.  A standard is like a blueprint. It provides guidance to someone when he or she actually builds something. Standards are not limited to software, but are an important part of telecommunications, environment, manufacturing, computing etc

Standards are also employed when we have to ensure that things made by different people will either work together or work in the same way (i.e. interoperate). Think of it this way: - when you go buy a screw, you only need to know the size and it will fit in the hole that it is designed for. So you can have several manufacturers of the same screw so long as they adhere to the standard, it will be ok. It doesn’t matter how the manufacturers produces the screws at their various factories.

In the same way ECMA Office Open XML is a blueprint (as is ODF which was submitted by OASIS). It is not software, but rather a description of how one should write out the information in word processing documents, spreadsheets, and presentations so as they can be accessible from any application (out with proprietary formats) and be available into the future even when the corporations that created the applications may no longer exist (think 100 years from now, who knows what companies will be surviving or what business they will be in). Different software can then and be able to create or consume the spreadsheets, word processing documents and presentation documents if they conform to the blueprint/structure.

For an independent analysis (without the Vendors esp. Microsoft, IBM, Sun etc) then please see analysis posted at :

http://blogs.forrester.com/information_management/2007/08/can-anyone-be-o.html.