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New OOXML Scandal - A Leaked Email Surfaces in France - Updated: New Details from Norway

By Pamela Jones et al.

Le Monde Informatique and LeMagIT are reporting on a leaked email from Marc Meyer of the French government agency, DGME, which urges that OOXML be quickly added to the official list of formats that can be used by government entities, a document titled RGI, and then the finalized v1.0 of RGI be quickly published, in effect locking in OOXML, before the appeals process is completed. The email and the media reports indicate that the RGI was put on a back burner last October, when ODF was already on the list, and now, immediately after OOXML is approved, albeit controversially, by ISO but before the appeals process is complete, not to mention the format, Meyer urges it quickly be added to the list of acceptable formats, hence making it hard to remove OOXML from the list later, as a fait accompli.

Worse, the email indicates that work on the document was brought to a crawl to wait for ISO approval of OOXML. ODF was already on the list when work on RGI was brought to a standstill last October. There were suspicions that the slowdown was deliberate, and the email is giving legs to those suspicions.

It seems that politics has reared its ugly head, and just as happened in Masschusetts, questions are now being asked about behind-the-scenes Microsoft pressure.

Meyer is the project manager in charge of the RGI initiative [in French "Chef de service DGME/Développement de l'Administration Electronique"], of DGME (the French government agency tasked [PDF] with modernizing the French bureaucracy, which includes technical standards). Here's an article in French from 2006 explaining RGI.

Full post as published by Groklaw on April 18, 2008 (boomark / email).