I ask the national members of ISO to vote “NO” to the ballot on the Microsoft Office OpenXML (OOXML) specification to become an ISO standard for the following reasons:

1. There is already a standard ISO26300 named Open Document Format (ODF): a dual standard adds cost to industry, government and citizens;
2. There is no provable implementation of the OOXML specification: Microsoft Office 2007 produces a special version of OOXML, not a file format which complies with the OOXML specification;
3. There is missing information from the specification document, for example how to do a autoSpaceLikeWord95 or useWord97LineBreakRules;
4. More the 10% of the examples mentioned in the standard do not validate XML conformity;
5. There is no garantee that anybody can write a software that fully implements the OOXML specification without being liable to patent damages or patent license fees;
6. This standard conflicts with other ISO standards, such as ISO 8601 (Representation of dates and times), ISO 639 (Codes for the Representation of Names and Languages) or ISO/IEC 10118-3 (cryptographic hash);
7. There is a bug in the spreadsheet file format which forbids to enter any date before the year 1900: such bugs affects the OOXML specification as well as software versions such as Microsoft Excel 2000, XP, 2003 or 2007.
8. This standard has not been created by bringing together the experience and expertise of all interested parties (such as the producers, sellers, buyers, users and regulators), but by Microsoft alone.

Vote now!