THE EUROPEAN Commission has started investigating Microsoft's OOXML standard under procurement rules instead of the old competition statute with which they usually bash the software giant.

The Danish Unix User Group (DKUUG) complained to the EC's competition regulators in February about a Danish government mandate on the use of software standards. But the Competition lot didn't want to know about it.

The European Commission confirmed today that its Internal Market people had taken up the complaint. They were examining it to see if it constituted an infringement of procurement rules.

An EC spokeswoman said the EC was not ready to say any more on the matter: " The complaint is still under examination by DG MARKT services."

The DKUUG complaint had asserted that the Danish government put Microsoft competitors at disadvantage.

Things have moved on since the original complaint, under which the DKUUG said that the Danish government's decision to mandate the use of OOXML gave Microsoft an unfair competitive advantage.

The complaint made an issue of the fact that OOXML wasn't an
international standard and the fact that Microsoft hadn't published the specifications, meaning no-one else could develop software making full use of documents written using Microsoft products.

But OOXML has since been endorsed by the International Standards Organisation (although the endorsement is being contested,) and Microsoft has published its specifications (though critics say they contain restrictions).

Keld Simonsen, vice chair of DKUUG, said the complaint still had substance.

It was based, as originally, on the idea that Ecma International, the standards body that backed OOXML, had specified
that the standard was to be implemented "in a way that is fully
compatible with the large existing investments in Microsoft Office
documents."

This meant that it was designed to give Microsoft documents an
advantage, said, Simonsen, in the same way a television manufacturer might have an advantage over its rivals if had designed a signal that was tuned to operate special features on its own sets.

The EC's procurement police are now considering whether this puts the Danish government in breach of procurement rules, despite the moves Microsoft has made to make its standard acceptable.

The Danes had mandated that public bodies had a choice of standards and that choice included both OOXML and the open document format. If one of them chose OOXML as their official standard that might effectively give Microsoft an advantage in public procurement competitions because it could say that its products were the best fit for the standard.

But would it restrict others who wanted to bid? µ