India, Brazil, and South Africa are attempting to appeal ISO's fast-track approval of Microsoft's controversial Office Open XML (OOXML) format. The organizations representing those countries in ISO complain of process irregularities, lack of inclusiveness during meetings and debates, and insufficient time to address all of the issues and concerns raised by participants during the review process.

OOXML received approval last month after receiving support from approximately 86 percent of the national bodies that participated in the process. The highly-politicized approval process faced heavy scrutiny from critics who allege that Microsoft engaged in abusive practices including committee-stuffing and vote buying. But the format also received strong support from unexpected allies, like ODF coeditor Patrack Durusau who described it as a "poster child fro the open standards development process."

The matter of gravest concern to the countries that are appealing the approval is that many of the issues brought up during the initial review were glossed over during a block-voting process due to time constraints. During the Ballot Resolution Meeting, most of ECMA's responses to problems in the specification were approved collectively without discussion.

"Since only 67 of the 1,027 responses by ECMA were discussed, the processes used to 'approve' the remaining responses by voting were questionable and did nothing to promote concensus, but simply 'approved' ECMA's attempt to improve the quality of the standard. This was especially disconcerting to the large number of experts from various countries who had spent many hours in ad hoc meetings during the period of the BRM to develop consensus on some of the ECMA responses that contained errors or other issues of contention," South African Bureau of Standards CEO M. Kuscus wrote in his request for an appeal. "South Africa challenges the validity of a final vote that we contend was based upon inadequate information resulting from a poorly conducted BRM."

The reasons cited by Brazil for its appeal are also similar. Because of time constraints, the representatives from Brazil were not permitted to present proposals for improvements. They also complain that the final text of the standard still hasn't been published despite clear rules requiring publication within 30 days after the Ballot Resolution Meeeting.

Where the dispute goes from here is still unclear. Standards expert and OOXML critic Andy Updegrove has written a blog entry that discusses the official rules for the ISO appeal process and notes that they are somewhat ambiguous.

The OOXML controversy will apparently linger on in the aftermath of the ISO approval process and will likely continue to cast a cloud of uncertainty over Microsoft's format.

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