Microsoft quietly got its proposed Office Open XML format through two European standards bodies. A member of the Free Software Foundation Europe looks at the low-profile process that made it happen.
After the International Organization for Standardization voted to reject Microsoft’s Office Open XML document format as a standard, the detailed results from ISO member countries give us a lot of material to analyze. Votes from Southeastern Europe and former Yugoslavia countries showed Microsoft’s domination of that market, and especially good connections with authorities because the most of national standardization bodies voted Yes with no comments.
Romania and Bulgaria, members of European Union, together with Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia and Serbia, gave a green light for Microsoft’s format, with comments from Bulgaria. In this story, we take a look at the decision processes and reactions in those countries.
CSI: Croatia
A deeper look in Croatian case starts on their national standardization body Web site.
Even a couple of weeks after the “fast track” voting process began, the Croatian Standards Institute (CSI) did not publish any press release or any other form of announcement related to the Croatian Yes on OOXML.
CSI is a public, independent, nonprofit organization founded by Croatian government, financed from state budget, and partly by membership fee from its members on a yearly basis. But it is still unclear why CSI kept it’s decisions away from country’s general public.
Behavior like this meant that everyone interested in this issue in Croatia had to become informed about the result from outside the country. As we can read on his blog, one of the Croatian Free Software community members tried to reach CSI to find out who is participating in CSI’s IT technical board, and the votes of every board member. In response, CSI stated that “guaranties security and secrecy of personal information and obligates that they will not be provided to third parties.”
CSI also told the Linux user, “The only data available to the public on CSI’s Web site is elated to president and secretary of technical board. Informations about voting process and technical board are not available to public”. CSI is a public institution. However, information about votes of board members are hidden from Croatian citizens.
However, the Croatian government does recommend the already standardized OpenDocument Format (ODF) for government information systems. A few months before the OOXML procedure, the office for development of governmental information systems, “E-Croatia”>, made a recommendation for ODF and PDF as document formats.
Silence in Serbia
The Serbian case went a bit differently. The Serbian Institute for Standardization (SIS) is the successor of the Yugoslav Institute for Standardization, and after the separation of Serbia and Montenegro the forming of SIS went a bit slowly. According to information on the Web site, not yet available in English, SIS should become an independent nonprofit organization, but until it does, it remains a government institution.
Because of its slow transition, SIS did not have any technical board or expertise about this issue, as an SIS staffer told one of the Serbian free software community members over the phone. The only communication that happened was that phone call, since SIS turned out to be very hard to reach. Although Croatia’s CSI answered e-mail, SIS made no response even to official e-mails from the Free Software Foundation Europe, an organization with a solid base of supporters in Serbia. FSFE also prepared some questions for national standardization bodies on the issue, and translated them to Serbian.
Any impact on this issue from the general public or independent experts was very hard. In the first place, SIS is still being formed, so it is hard to expect that body to do a complicated task such as examining Microsoft’s 6000-page OOXML document. Second, there was no public information about this process, since SIS’s Web site doesn’t contain any information related to OOXML issue at all.
Common issues
There is another observation related to both Serbian and Croatian national standardizations bodies in context of “Yes, with no comments” type of vote. Behavior of both bodies might be, with accent on might, considered through problem with corruption. First, OOXML procedures were not immune to questionable Microsoft influences worldwide, as in Poland and Sweden, so Linux users in Croatia and Serbia have doubts and questions on this matter.
Serbia is, according to several corruption rankings, in the bottom half of all countries (lower is worse), and Croatia is around 20 places ahead. Croatia had a bit more transparent process on OOXML than Serbia, just as it is a little ahead on those lists.
The online rights organization Electronic Frontier Finland showed a statistical correlation between the likelihood of a “yes” vote on OOXML and the country’s Corruption Perceptions Index as published by Transparency International. The countries seen as most corrupt were also most likely to vote for OOXML.
Croatian laws keep its national body’s votes secret, so the only way for the Croatian public to find out how the process went would be if a board member illegally leaked information out of CSI. This is, of course, unlikely to happen. And the Serbian national standardization body is not officially formed, so those two votes were easy for Microsoft, and probably not only ones around the globe.
Neither the Web site of Serbia’s SIS or Croatia’s CSI pass the World Wide Web Consortium’s validator. Is either organization really concerned about standards?
