July 20, 2007

Open XML recovers from setback to ISO approval

In the runup to the ISO vote on whether to approve Open XML, the executive committee of INCITS approved the Open XML draft 'with comments'

Some in the industry are taking a middle ground on the Open XML-ODF debate and promoting both by emphasizing the idea of choice. Melanie Wyne, executive director of the Initiative for Software Choice (ISC), which promotes neutral government procurement, standards, and public research and development policies for software, said her group is promoting the existence of both ODF and Open XML as ISO standards because having only one global standard for document formats is limiting to end-users.

"Technology is a rapidly developing area, and if you standardize on one technology, you could wind up losing out on functionality or applications that may develop in the future," she said.

ISC is run by CompTIA, a U.S.-based technology industry association, and has about 280 member companies and organizations. Microsoft is among them; however, IBM and Sun, the two biggest proponents of ODF, are not.

Wyne said that the ISC does not support any kind of mandates by governments or public agencies about what kind of technology is run in their systems. Instead, the group believes the key focus should be interoperability between different kinds of technology.

"Our feeling is there are a number of ways to getting to interoperability, and open standards is just one in a number of those ways," she said.

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