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What Do The ISO And The NBA Have In Common?

My favorite quote of the day so far comes from a comment that was filed on Bob Sutor's post about how the International Organization of Standardization is risking irrelevancy based on the way it ignored objections to the rushing of the Office Open XML (OOXML) specification through the ISO's ratification process. OOXML is primarily a Microsoft-authored competitor to the already ISO-ratified OpenDocument Format (ODF). Bob Sutor is the grand pooh-bah of open standards at IBM (a major proponent of ODF).

In his post, Sutor thoroughly lashed the ISO:

News came out over the weekend that representatives from six countries -- Brazil, South Africa, Venezuela, Ecuador, Paraguay, and Cuba -- have written an open letter to the ISO and IEC criticizing the handling of the OOXML appeals...

...I had hoped for better from the ISO and IEC. I had hoped that they would not try to force the opinions of the executives on the boards considering the appeals. I had hoped that ISO and IEC would understand that refusing to give a fair hearing to the concerns of emerging economies would be neither logical nor sensible.

I'm usually an optimist, but in situation after situation, the response has always been "we are right and -- wait a minute until we find it -- we have a rule which justifies our forcing OOXML through the system."

But the gem of a quote came in one of the comments:

If MS-OOXML can be approved, I'd like to see what will be rejected in the future. Sorta feels like you're watching an NBA game where the officials have already placed their bets!

My post here isn't to say which ISO standard better or worse: OOXML or ODF. But, with the ISO's approval of OOXML as a standard for the same thing that the ISO-ratified ODF does, the ISO is now getting outted for the way its practices could plunge it into irrelevancy. ArsTechnica recently published a post under the headline ISO: procedural shortcuts OK, OpenXML appeal denied. Pamela Jones over at Groklaw asks why certain provisos in the ISO's own directives document are somehow getting overlooked. And there are tons of other posts about the issue amounting to a collective "What the ?" from the Internet community.

On one hand, I'm glad to see that the ISO is finally getting the criticism it so badly deserves. Ecma, the organization responsible for putting OOXML on the ISO's "fast track" deserves it, too. It should have been dismantled for the sham that it is years ago. Its process comes up way short in the integrity department: a state of affairs that was only confirmed (in my mind) by the way Ecma presided over the recent ECMAScript (JavaScript) deliberations. It's a long story with the appearance of a happy ending called ECMAScript Harmony. But my sense is that the ending wasn't quite so harmonious for everyone. The guy who runs Ecma (or ran it at the time OOXML was fast tracked) -- Jan van den Beld -- basically admitted it was a bit of sham when, in my interview of him, he said the following:

Ecma made all standards for DVD -- five competing rewriteable/recordable formats. They all do the same thing. The reason there are five is that there this is a patent war. All of those standards have been fast-tracked to the ISO and all been approved without any comments. The ISO cannot decide for one industry group. It must be neutral. It can pick one over the other. There's no possibility for a standards body to decide it in favor of IBM, Sun, or Microsoft. It's very possible for the ISO to set both standards. There may be overlap, but it doesn't matter. For the ISO, it's impossible to get in the way of patent wars.

On the other hand, all this discussion of the ISO suddenly becoming irrelevant should come as news to no one. Almost two years ago, based on what I knew of the process then, I wrote:

To me, Ecma is not a standards body. As evidenced by the DVD situation (which is ridiculous, if you ask me), it's little more than a puppet with a pipeline through which vendors can pump their proprietary technologies into the ISO standardization process (avoiding the rigor that should normally be applied to anything up for consideration as an ISO standard). As such, the ISO is sort of a joke, too.

Again, I want to make sure that my opinion here isn't stretched into being an opinion of the technologies discussed. Imagine, for example, if the W3C came up with two standards for the Web? It doesn't mattter which two it picked. What matters is the lack of interoperability that follows. It's the process that stinks and that will ultimately take down an organization that the world badly needs during this time of globalization.

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