Not a standard debate
by Colin Dodd
The battle over international standards for file formats promises to be a long-drawn one. Just when one felt that the embers were cooling with the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) having accepted Microsoft’s Office Open XML (OOXML) format as an international standard (after rejecting appeals from four countries including India), two developments threaten to light the coals again.
First, IBM is threatening to leave organisations that set standards for software interoperability over concerns that their processes are not always transparent (the ostensible references are to the ISO and Microsoft).
Second, according to sources close to the development, the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) — which met in New Delhi on the 22nd of this month — is reviewing the ISO transparency issue while simultaneously exploring alternate standards which emerge from bodies like the W3C and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).
