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In Weir’s article, ” Bait and Switch“, he informs us that Microsoft is going back on public promises regarding control of the standard, should it be approved, promises which Ecma echoed [PDF]. You can’t take your eyes off Microsoft for even a minute, can you?

Here’s part of what Weir writes:

So much for the promises. What makes this story worthy of a blog post is that we now know that, as these promises were be made to NB’s, at that same time Ecma was planning something that contradicted their public assurances. Ecma’s “Proposal for a Joint Maintenance Plan” [pdf] outlines quite a different vision for how OOXML will be maintained.

A summary of the proposed terms:

• OOXML remains under Ecma (Microsoft) control under Ecma IPR policy.
• Ecma TC45 will accept a liaison from JTC1/SC34 who can participate on maintenance activities and only maintenance activities.
• Similarly, Ecma TC45 documents and email archives will be made available to the liaison (and through him a set of technical experts), but only the documents and emails related to maintenance.
• No mention of voting rights for the liaison or the experts, so I must assume that normal Ecma rules apply — only Ecma members can vote.
• Future revisions of OOXML advance immediately to “Stage” 4″ of the ISO process, essentially enshrining the idea that future versions will given fast-track treatment

A critical point to note is that “maintenance” in ISO terms is not the same as what the average software engineer thinks of as “maintenance”. The work of producing new features or enhancements is not maintenance. The act of creating OOXML 1.1 or OOXML 2.0 is not maintenance. What is maintenance is the publication of errata documents for OOXML 1.0, a task that must be completed within 3 years.

Bait and switch indeed. Now, I’m a simple soul, so I could well be missing something, but it looks to me like at February’s meeting, any unresolved technical issues can have Microsoft promising to fix the issue, hence winning approval, after which it, through, Ecma, controls how and when it is deemed “fixed”, since voting is by rubber stamp Ecma.

Uh oh.

Does that sound like a good plan to you? Microsoft controls maintenance of its own standard? That may not lead to true interoperability, methinks.

[..]

Convenor Martin Bryan, in his “Working Group Status Report” prepared to report on WG1 activity for the December 2007 Meeting of ISO/IEC JTC1/SC34/WG1 in Kyoto:

The influx of P members whose only interest is the fast-tracking of ECMA 376 as ISO 29500 has led to the failure of a number of key ballots. Though P members are required to vote, 50% of our current members, and some 66% of our new members, blatantly ignore this rule despite weekly email reminders and reminders on our website. As ISO require at least 50% of P members to vote before they start to count the votes we have had to reballot standards that should have been passed and completed their publication stages at Kyoto. This delay will mean that these standards will appear on the list of WG1 standards that have not been produced within the time limits set by ISO, despite our best efforts.

He writes that ISO is becoming a laughing stock in IT circles and suggests standards that are outstanding be sent over to OASIS.