-----Original Message-----
From: Jonathan Ramsay [mailto:jrramsay@gmail.com]
Sent: Friday, January 26, 2007 11:07 AM
To: isot@ansi.org
Subject: serious concerns
Dear Jennifer Garner, Sara Desautels or Henrietta Scully,
To keep this short -- I oppose MS "openxml" after having
to jump
through hoops recently to get a docx file open. I work daily
with XML
and am quite frustrated that the word "open" is associated
with this
file format. While doing research I found your ISO goal
and this huge
list of similar concerns.
Please feel free to contact me to discuss any of these issues
, below
is one of the my least favorite of MS open form issues -
that an open
standard is a single standard and not multiple levels of
different
access,
Jonathan Ramsay
18 Baker St
Dover NH 03870
603-743-6772
Ecma 376 is a vendor lock-in specification
* Adoption of Ecma 376 in its current
state would frustrate the
ISO goal [PDF] of "one standard, one test, and one conformity
assessment procedure accepted everywhere." Yet Microsoft's
Alan Yates
has freely admitted that the primarily goal of Ecma 376's
sponsor is
to have two standards instead of one: "What I'm really going
to be
talking about is Massachusetts actually opening up to more
choice and
more competition than the current policy has. That's, I
think that's
the fundamental decision that's before us. Can Massachusetts
open up
to more choice, additional standards, in order to enable
greater value
over a period of time?"
* Ecma 376 adoption would in effect grant
Microsoft a monopoly on
the conversion of its binary formats to XML
* Ecma 376 is at least arguably violative
of an existing antitrust
injunction issued by the European Commission DG Competition*
* Ecma 376 is at least arguably violative
of an antrust injunction
issued in U.S. v. Microsoft
* Microsoft's refusal to disclose specifications
for its binary
file formats is under anti-trust investigation by the European
Commission