IBM Institutes New Tech Standards Policy...

IBM on Tuesday released a policy the company plans to follow when interacting with any technical standards organization. The policy, Big Blue claims, is being instituted to ensure that any technical standards organization in which IBM participates assures that electronic devices and software programs are developed in order to interact with one another.

The new standards policy comes after IBM voiced its dissent in an apparent dig at Microsoft in April when the International Organization of Standards (ISO) agreed to fast track Open Office XML for international standardization. OOXML, used by Microsoft's Office 2007 productivity suite, is a competitor of the OpenDocument Format (ODF), which IBM supports.

IBM has said the fast-track approval process was inadequate in light of the complexity of OOXML (more than 6,000 pages of code), and exposed flaws in the standardization process. "People now have some sense that there are no brakes on putting the wrong standards though some existing processes," Bob Sutor, IBM's executive vice president of standards, wrote at the time.

Yet even with IBMs protests, the ISO and International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) approved the ISO/IEC DIS 29500, the official moniker given to the publication of the OOXML specification.

IBM's policy update comes after the publication of ISO/IEC DIS 29500 which may have prompted Big Blue to facilitate an online discussion forum between 70 independent experts in the fields of law, academia, standards, government and public policy. The conversation, which was conducted over the summer of 2008, brought the computer manufacturer to adopt the following standards when interacting with open technology standards groups, such as the ISO.

The tenets of IBM's new policy are to:

• Begin or end participation in standards bodies based on the quality and openness of their processes, membership rules, and intellectual property policies.

• Encourage emerging and developed economies to both adopt open global standards and to participate in the creation of those standards.

• Advance governance rules within standards bodies that ensure technology decisions, votes, and dispute resolutions are made fairly by independent participants, protected from undue influence.

• Collaborate with standards bodies and developer communities to ensure that open software interoperability standards are freely available and implementable.

• Help drive the creation of clear, simple and consistent intellectual property policies for standards organizations, thereby enabling standards developers and implementers to make informed technical and business decisions.

"Common, open and consensus-based technology standards from reputable standards bodies help ensure that each of us can easily purchase and interchangeably use computing technology from multiple vendors," Bob Sutor, IBM vice president of open source and standards, said in a statement. "The ways in which they are created and adopted provide reasonable assurances that disparate products will work with one another, and withstand the test of time."

IBM's policy is effective immediately.