02 October 2008, 12:27

Is Microsoft trying to take control of ODF?

After a recent meeting of the SC 34 committee, the ISO/IEC group responsible for OOXML, Groklaw are reporting that they believe Microsoft are trying to take control of the Open Document Format (ODF), the uncontroversial open document format standard.

Groklaw observed from the published notes of the last meeting, that a non-public "Liason Request" has been sent to OASIS that aims to move control of maintenance of ISO/IEC 26300 standard, the ODF standard, to SC34, despite the recent creation of a new OASIS committee to manage ODF Interoperability and Conformance.

The legal blog also collated the affiliations of attendees to the meeting, which was omitted from the meeting report, and notes that 8 of the 20 members were Microsoft employees or consultants. Comments at Groklaw suggest that SC 34 is taking advantage of a request to ensure translatability between ISO/IEC 26300 (ODF) and 29500 (OOXML) to justify taking control of the ODF standard through a process of standardising ODF to comply with OOXML. It was suggested by Groklaw that SC 34 already has plenty of work to do on OOXML as people file more defect reports on the ISO/IEC standard.

(djwm)

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