South Africa is appealing a decision to make Microsoft Corp.'s Office Open XML format an internationally recognized standard for electronic documents, officials said on 28 th May. The South African Bureau of Standards sent a letter of protest to two Geneva-based organizations that held a worldwide ballot on Microsoft's application last month, complaining that the process was poorly conducted and rushed. SABS Chief Executive Martin Kuscus said on May 22 “"We challenge the validity of a process that, from beginning to end, required all parties to analyze far too much information in far too little time," through letter to the International Standards Organization and the International Electrotechnical Commission.
Long before Microsoft started selling Office 2007, its plan to switch to OOXML for saving Word, Excel and PowerPoint files sparked worries among competitors that future changes made by the software maker could render government or corporate archives unreadable especially by non-Microsoft programs. That could lock the lucrative large customers in to buying software from Microsoft forever, they said. Supporters of a rival format called OpenDocument Format have claimed that Microsoft used strong-arm tactics to win approval from the national committees that voted on the new standard last month. ODF also an international standard recognized by ISO is used by Sun Microsystems Inc. and IBM Corp. software.
South Africa's appeal is in line with its government's policy to use free open-source software except in cases where proprietary software is "demonstrated to be significantly superior," according to a government Web site. The country is also home to Mark Shuttleworth, founder of a popular flavor of the Linux open-source operating system called Ubuntu, who has publicly expressed his opposition to the OOXML ratification. South Africa may also have been swayed by arguments from Sun and IBM, said Rob Helm, director of research at the independent group Directions on Microsoft
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