ConsortiumInfo.org - Now There are Two: Brazil Appeals OOXML Adoption

This is an interesting diversion, and suggests perhaps some ODF advocate vendors are getting better return-on-investment for their lobbying activities than, e.g., the Hillary Clinton campaign currently is.

Associação Brasileira de Normas Técnicas (ABNT), the National Body representing Brazil, today filed an appeal to the approval of OOXML by ISO/IEC, bringing the current total of appeals to two, with as many as two additional appeals to come, based upon what I have heard from private sources. The text of the Brazilian appeal appears in full at the end of this blog entry, supplied by a trusted source in Brazil.
While this latest appeal overlaps the South African objections in part, it also raises new concerns, some of which are particular to the interests of Brazil, rather than applying to the process as a whole. As a result, it raises not only additional issues, but also ones that present a categorically different basis for appeal as well.

As we noted in the Burton Group report on this topic earlier this year, ISO standardization of OOXML will simplify business in some domains for OOXML-backing vendors (e.g., with governments and other organizations that mandate support for ISO standards), and will also continue to improve OOXML through an open, community-driven collaborative process, as the review culminating in the ISO vote a couple months ago clearly did.

If a few national bodies are able to stall or torpedo the ISO OOXML standard, however, doing so certainly wouldn't somehow make it possible for ODF to leapfrog OOXML. OOXML is gaining market momentum primarily because it is robustly useful in real-world domains where ODF currently isn't, not because of the ISO seal of standards approval.

ConsortiumInfo.org - Now There are Two: Brazil Appeals OOXML Adoption