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Sage Words From Patrick Durusau (ODF Project Editor)

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I included a reference to Partick's open letter in my posting of yesterday. The more I thought about it, the more it occurred to me that it was important to elevate this.

Patrick Durusau is well respected in the international standardization community and is the Project Editor for ODF.

He wrote an open letter endorsing Open XML as an "open standard" and overall expressing an endorsement of the process involved in the creation of DIS 29500. 

I really like his comment in his first footnote on the first page:

Granted, I have a number of issues with the current OpenXML proposal but experts do disagree in good faith even within open standards development projects. If a proposal cannot progress until we all agree, then we risk proposals being held hostage to whim and caprice.

The fact that there may be issues that remain open and/or in contention does not necessitate the perpetuation of a "no" following the BRM. The national standards bodies will be considering the overall picture of their full set of comments based upon their dispositions. I am hopeful that the same spirit of standards professionalism exhibited in Patrick's letter will be reflected across all NSBs.

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