Is Red Hat opposing new "international document standard" to lay ground work for ban on Windows?

Add Red Hat (RHAT) investors to the list of shareholder communitiess being poorly served by its corporate management in the matter of opposing a group of public companies and well-respected organizations trying to get a new document format standard approved by the International Standards Organization (ISO) this month. The group that Red Hat opposes includes Apple (APPL), Barclays Capital, BP, The British Library, Essilor, The Gnome Foundation, Intel (INTL), Microsoft (MSFT), NextPage, Novell (NOVL), Statoil, Toshiba, the United States Library of Congress, and ECMA International. The standard under review is Office Open XML (OOXML), the most popular implementation of which is Microsoft Office 2007.

In a standards process like this, a regional or functional organization such as ECMA International (formerly called the European Computer Manufacturers Association) takes the lead when going to ISO. By way of comparison with OOXML, AiiM carried the water to ISO for Adobe for .pdf and the OASIS Group (whose foundational sponsors are BEA, IBM, Primeton, SAP and Sun) was the conduit for Sun's Open Document Format (ODF). Red Hat says its primary objection to the ECMA standard is that there already is an ISO standard, Sun's ODF, for document formatting. But of course there are already multiple ISO document format standards such as Adobe's--with others coming.

So what does it matter if there is three or four or five? Red Hat's position is non-sensical unless you read between the lines. From an IT investment research point of view, you would think an infrastructure software supplier like Red Hat (Linux and JBoss middleware, which runs on top of both Linux and Windows) would want multiple suppliers offering application products in the "international" marketplace in order to sell more infrastructure software. This is especially true for JBoss, whose sales--as opposed to "free" open source distributions--have taken off slower than Red Hat had expected.

But apparently Red Hat is taking the restrictive position of trying to close off one market to Microsoft--even one that Red Hat itself does not compete in--on the hopes that eventually it can also convince governments around the world to close off the operating software market to Microsoft's Windows. Although Red Hat currently sells the Linux operating software primarily to replace 20- and 30-year old Unix operating software, it has said it plans on taking 50% of the infrastructure software market by 2015. Red Hat apparently believes to reach that goal it will also have to compete against Microsoft Windows server operating software at some point.

Red Hat also objects to the ECMA standard because Microsoft supposedly hasn't released some obscure specifications from the 1990s. Microsoft has released 30,000 pages of specfications and would certainly release 30,001 if need be.

Finally Red Hat crtiicized ISO's fast-track process. But of course, that's ISO's process--one it uses to standardize household items, airplanes, bowling balls, you name it--so to criticize Apple, Barclays Capital, BP, The British Library, ECMA, Essilor, The Gnome Foundation, Intel, Microsoft, NextPage, Novell, Statoil, Toshiba, and the United States Library of Congress because of the ISO rules is an incredible stretch. As Dr. Istvan Sebestyen, secretary general of ECMA explains via email: "In case of OOXML we tried to be very open, we have put up the first public draft in Summer of 2006. At the same time we intensified liaison with (ISO's) JTC 1 Sc34, and invited them to participate in our meetings. They also had our interim drafts. We have also installed on the internet a public response channel, on which interested people could submit their reactions to the draft.

"... (and) the standardization of PDF 1.7 fast track at ISO TC171 has been actually faster."

-- Dennis Byron