Last Thursday PKN (Polish Normalization Committee) had a meeting on which it was supposed to come up with the decision concerning Polish recommendation for ISO/IEC DIS 29500 (OOXML) proposed standard. The common stance has not been acheived.

You may have read our background article about ODF and OOXML and why Red Hat believes OOXML should not be approved as an ISO standard. This time, we focus on how the standardization process has been compromised at ISO.

After I gave my presentation on the BRM, and after Ditesh gave his technical evaluation of the resolutions, the TC4 Chair opened the meeting to the floor. Mr Cheong Yuk Wai, from IASA Malaysia, volunteered. We expected him to delve into the technical matters which Microsoft should have braindumped him.

Simon Phipps proposes a hard problem: expanding the definition of "open source" to include patents.

The easy part is dealing with any patents that are actually licensable by the person or company who is licensing the code. To get to a new "definition" you could say that copyright licenses that don't also grant a patent license must be accompanied by a patent license grant.

"The French parliament will soon debate a draft law "about the High Authority for the dissemination of works and protection of the rights on the internet". The project incorporates the recommendations made by the then CEO of FNAC (biggest CD and DVD retail stores in France), Denis Olivennes. One of the key measures is to sanction a violation of copyright by cutting access to the Internet.

OpenDocument and OOXMLWith fewer than 48 hours to go throughout most of the world, only a small percentage of the 87 countries that voted last summer on OOXML have announced whether they will stand by, or change, the votes that they cast during the original six month voting period.

On the eve of what may well be an ‘ends justify the means’ victory for MS at the ISO, I did a little experiment to compare the rate of ODF format documents vs MS’ XML document format ala this page.