It’s a battle seemingly far removed from all of us. But in fact there’s a good chance your interests are deeply involved in this conflict being  fought out in boardrooms and Internet forums across the world. Say helloto the OOXML vs ODF battle! Wait ! This is not about technicalterms and jargon you are not interested in knowing about – it really does  concern you.

This battle is about how files and documents are stored in your computer. What’s the problem here? Unfortunately, everything that is stored in our computers is “encoded” in some way.

And the big problem  with a secret encoding format is that, what is essentially your information is all locked up and the secret key to opening the document is known only to the maker of the application you used to prepare  the document.

To explain: Government records, medicalrecords, our personal files, books, etc are all stored in this format. Imagine the Government has plenty of files stored in MS Word  98 format.  If Microsoft Corporation chose to phase out older versions of Word in favour of newer versions, the Government would be at the mercy of that one company to be able to access the information stored in older  MS Word formats. 

Bowing to pressure from Governments and private corporations across theworld, three or four years ago Microsoft came up with the ‘Office Open XMLstandard’. This standard is available to those found eligible by Microsoft  Corporation on the signing of a “royalty free covenant not to sue”  agreement.

Theoretically speaking, any person with access to the details of this standard would be able to write a program that would make it  possible to open files stored in the OOXML format.

However, matters have not ended there. On internet forums and chatrooms, many technology experts say that the OOXML standard is not really “open” and that Microsoft   continues to hold essential bits of information regarding it’s encoding format secret.

The standard is far too closely tied to the MS Office application and it really will not be straightforward for someone other than Microsoft to use it effectively, they charge.

Opponents of the OOXML standard believe that the answer to the problem lies   with the ISO certified Open Document Format (ODF). This is a standard developed by the technical committee of the Organisation for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS). Members of this committee come from a varied set of backgrounds.

‘OpenOffice’, Google Docs, etc comply with this encoding format. However Microsoft Corporation is unwilling to adopt this standard and argues that the two standards could coexist. The battle between ODF and OOXML has been heating up over the last few  months.

There are big names on both sides – private corporations like IBM, Sun and Oracle support the ODF  while the  OOXML has it’s own big name supporterslike Apple, Intel and HP.

Governments across the world are reviewing the standards and Japan has announced   it’s support for the ODF standard while Malaysia is seriously considering going the same way.  India, along with 123 other countries will be voting on whetherthe OOXML standard should become an ISO standard on September 2nd '07.

The Bureau   of Indian Standards (BIS) will vote on India’s behalf.

Of course there is hectic lobbying going on from all sides to attempt to influence  fate of the vote. The battle ultimately is about  who controls what – implications run into billions of dollars. The bottom line for us users is that when everyone agrees to abide by one standard (the way all manufacturers make electrical plugs of the same standard size) we would not  be bound by one vendor.

We could use one application to create our documents and be free to use a completely different one to open it a couple of years later.  Who do you think should set the standard? 

The writer is from Deeproot Linux