-----Original Message-----
From: BRM [mailto:bm_witness@yahoo.com]
Sent: Thursday, May 31, 2007 1:05 PM
To: lrajchel@ansi.org
Subject: Contributions from a US Citizen regarding INCITS/V1
for Consideration During Development of Proposed US Vote on ISO/IEC DIS 29500
Office Open XML File Formats
Dear Lisa Rajchel,
I am writing this to you, a member of the ISO JTC1 committee,
as a U.S.
Citizen in concern for the US Vote towards the recommendation
of
Microsoft's OOXML Format.
Please vote AGAINST this measure. OOXML should NOT be fast
tracked to
an ISO standard. This will only cause confusion as there
is already an
ISO standard for what OOXML cover, and will only make it
harder to
guarantee that documents that are required to be open for
the public
are truly open for the public, and will remain open to the
public for
years to come.
Additionally, there have been numerous issues with OOXML
brought forth,
including double standards within it (e.g. dates), its length
(6000+
pages), and its lock-in to Microsoft Word's implementations
(e.g.
spacing as done by Word 95, etc.
Furthermore, the OOXML is burdened by patents that Microsoft
holds -
which Microsoft admits. Therefore only parties that Microsoft
approves
will be able to implement the standard without infringing
their
patents. This prevents groups such as those behind KOffice,
OpenOffice,
AbiWord, and others from implementing the OOXML standard
- groups which
do implement the existing ISO standard.
Please help our government and economy by moving us away
from
dependence on a single vendor - Microsoft, and move us towards
an open
standards society where vendor specific software is not
required.
Microsoft is more than welcome to make contributions to
the current ISO
standard and help it become better and do more things. But
please let
there be one standard, and please do not let a vendor -
any vendor -
control it.
Finally, please check out the following website where there
is a good
deal of description and discussion of the problems regarding
OOXML:
http://www.grokdoc.net/index.php/EOOXML_objections.
Thank you for you time and have a good day.
Sincerely,
Benjamen R. Meyer
U.S. Citizen & IEEE Member
Johnstown, PA 15905
bm_witness@yahoo.com