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The ISO Document: India's and Venezuela's Appeals, as text

By Pamela Jones et al.

Here are the appeals to the ISO from India's Bureau of Indian Standards and Venezuela's standards body, FONDONORMA, regarding OOXML, as text, thanks to Steve Martin, once again, and Erwan. The PDF is here, if you wish to check it. India's section begins on page 13. Venezuela is on page 15. I've grouped them together because their issues are similar. We've seen and commented on Brazil's appeal and that same link takes you to a text version of the ISO/IEC's responses. If someone has time to help do a text version of South Africa's appeal, I'd appreciate it.

India, like Brazil, is bothered by not having the final text within a month, as per the JTC 1 directives, particularly when so many changes were voted on at the BRM. How can a national body know whether or not to appeal without a final text to analyze? So it asked that the window to appeal be extended, so that it had the opportunity to examine the final text. Venezuela challenges the entire process and says it undermines ISO's reputation. It raises the issue of a bad precedent being set, whereby large companies can exercise undue political pressure on a decision about a standard, instead of letting technical people work through and solve all the technical problems, which is what ISO normally has a history of doing quite well, from all I've heard:

The result of DIS 29500 has harmed the reputations of both ISO and the IEC, as well as all they member bodies, and has generated a terrible precedent in which the interest of large multi-national organization, both in favor or against an specific proposal, may dominate the debate instead of the technical discussions necessary to produce the optimal solution on every specific problem.

That really gets to the heart of the problem, in my book. So this was a first, as far as Venezuela is concerned, and one that it worries will start a new trend. It provides a list of comments on technical problems it raised, or tried to, that it feels were not appropriately handled at the BRM.

Full post as published by Groklaw on July 14, 2008 (boomark / email).