Now that the votes are tallied, the spinoff begins. So I think it will be best I voice my opinion on this day before others do it for me. I've already seen the first press releases only minutes after walking out the door of the conference room, so I'll probably be to late anyway.
Before going into how I voted, I would first like to sketch the atmosphere of this day. While everyone can still enjoy each-others company, I have many questions surrounding the motives and tactics of other members. It was quite a political day, and there is a lot to be political about.
There is difficulty in the difference in opinion on how the ISO process functions. What are the options again? Is it 'disapprove' or is that actually a 'conditional approve'? Can we abstain and then later approve / disapprove? How about the maximum number of disapprove votes? If there are too many of them, the BRM might not continue according to the ISO rules. Of course people say the BRM will always go through, but then again, that's what being said now. Can you trust parties who have vested interest in ODF, or have a campaign against Open XML bordering slander? Are known to influence ISO voting countries, or are suing countries where the ISO vote didn't go as planned? Or the fact that during our last meeting it was repeatedly made clear that a vote that would result in Open XML becoming an ISO standard was highly unfavorable for some, and would have no chance of succeeding. It even got down to some people having two separate sets of comments, one for the disapprove vote, one for the abstain vote, this to ensure that the news surrounding Open XML would always get negative for Microsoft.
The first thing one of us tried to do was keep in touch with the overall process, which was really great since it's easy to go back to name-calling and saying that the tag name 'paragraph' is much cooler than 'p', a level we need to rise above to be productive. So the process of the Dutch committee would be to first go through the comments and get to those that we agree upon, and their wording of course. Next these comments could be tied to the vote still to come.
During the first voting round it became clear that we had a few who where all for Open XML and would vote approve, their feeling was that the technical comments were not heavy enough to allow a DISAPPROVE to go through which I fully agree on. Obviously there were a few who didn't see it that way. I voted an APPROVE here.
Since we couldn't get to a consensus, the final round of discussion of the comments needed to start. Since we as a committee have one voice, we also have to reach consensus on the comments we put in to that vote as well, be it an approve vote, abstain, or disapprove. So, the interesting chore begins of re-iterating the comments people hand copy-pasted of grokdoc. The great thing about this part of the process is that we were actually capable of reaching a set of comments that we all agreed on. These comments were not tied to the voting procedure just yet. They were just the areas we agreed on the need to improve. One thing is the code-origin-part I blogged about, or an improvement for storing the backward compatibility items in a way more suitable for cross-application documents. Printer-settings were addressed on which there was consensus on advising to move towards XML in that area as well (printer-settings lie outside of the spec, and hence you cannot demand anything there, ODF doesn't as well, I believe the group agreed on this) We had a number of other greatly useful things to add to the spec, and personally I hope that the effort we put in will not be lost.
Next of course comes the part where we need to move to a general vote, and my stance on this was more nuanced. The difficulty is that the entire process revolved around people trusting each other, which is obviously difficult given the Microsoft, Sun, IBM love triangle J. Those opposing Open XML do not trust that their comments will actually be addressed when we approve Open XML (something the ECMA has stated to always do, even in ABSTAINS). Personally I feel the APPROVE is the right thing to do given the lightness of our comments and the precedent of other document formats missing huge interoperability parts which was given the go-ahead. Those for Open XML do not trust that casting a 'conditional-approve' will be interpreted as such. A 'conditonal-approve' is still a DISAPPROVE in my book, and the slides demonstrated before the meeting started also noted that there will be no BRM or Open XML ISO standard if more than I believe 1/4th of the votes are a DISAPPROVE. The difficulty is not this initial vote, but the unclearness of ISO in the allowed moves when the BRM takes place. The delegation going to ISO is rather powerful. They have to see whether the comments were addressed properly and the move from DISAPPROVE to APPROVE, but can you be sure this will happen? Personally
So all in all, it totally sucks. You cannot reach a conclusive and useful vote if there is no trust between parties. I feel that some people have much to do with that feeling of untrustworthiness given their campaign and open statements of wanting to block Open XML no matter what. Also on the other side, people are probably worried that Microsoft will act like Microsoft acted a decade or two ago. Think about HTML for instance, which didn't improve much with Internet Explorer and the standards support in that tool.
If someone says that they want to block Open XML no matter what, and then they will allow a 'conditional-approve' (a DISAPPROVE) by removing most of their comments, wouldn't you distrust their motives and feel that their current explanation of DISAPPROVE will be changed after the initial vote?
My stance on the second voting round was to allow a 'conditional-approve', while I had some distrust myself, I felt that this would open the process and allow the BRM to continue. I made very clear that I would only want this if:
- The entire committee would go out to the press and clearly state that we have conditionally approved Open XML, and there will be no spin on this
- The comments we had consensus on, and the requirements for their repair, would be made public clearly and openly
- The unreasonable comments would be dropped (duplicates ODF, etc…)
This second vote also didn't reach consensus. There was not enough trust that a conditional approval would be explained as such later on in the process. While I personally do not have that mistrust, I do understand it.
Next was the vote on whether to take the comments we had consensus on, and send them with the ABSTAIN vote. What I find rather amazing, is that also this very viable option (the comments at least reach ISO through official channels) was blocked. All of a sudden all comments were necessary for that to happen. Personally I don't understand this stance, and can only describe it as a political move. They seem to have no interest in getting the comments to ISO to improve Open XML (some clearly state that this is an outcome not in their books, no matter what), but they do have interest in that DISAPPROVE vote, given the amount of steering towards this result going on.
Now this is obviously going into the media, as one party blocking a vote and I feel that this is really wrong. Before the second vote I had enough trust in the other parties at the table that I felt it was possible to get to ISO Open XML using a conditional approve, lulled by the people around the table. But the next vote on the ABSTAIN has made me wondering about the motives. By not allowing comments to be passed to ISO in the ABSTAIN I clearly feel that there was a strategy of moving towards a DISAPPROVE in 'conditional-approve' clothes. I was seduced, and now that I am back home I am glad that this DISAPPROVE didn't happen. Clearly there was a tactic to be played for the DISAPPROVE votes, and I feel they almost had us, but luckily not quite due to the differences of opinion.
So the end result? An ABSTAIN without comments, the lowest of the low.