The rare event took place close to where international IT powers were gathered for the free-program conference "Go Open" in downtown Oslo on Wednesday. Many of the conference participants showed their support by holding banners along with the protesters in the cold and rainy weather.
OOXML, the document format used by default in Microsoft’s latest "Office" suite, has been approved by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) to be the international storage format, firing up both IT people and everyday computer users in Norway.
The protesters say OOXML is technically deficient and unnecessarily complex, and had urged the Norwegian government to vote against adopting it as the official open document standard.
The detractors also claim OOXML's victory will strengthen Microsoft’s already dominant market position, giving it monopoly-like power to force people the world over to use its programs.
Microsoft claims the other standard currently in use, OpenDocument Format (ODF), lacks backward compatibility for earlier software and is not sophisticated enough to handle mathematic formulations satisfactorily.
While some say the battle is lost already, as the proposal to adopt OOXML already has support from a majority of the so-called "P-members" of the ISO (including Norway), the opposition has not given up.
"We shouldn't forget that the EU Commission will evaluate the Norwegian [voting] process and perhaps other countries' voting," said Opera software technology director Håkon Wium Lie to technology news site TU.no. "In addition comes consideration for free competition, a theme in which the EU has been strongly involved earlier," he said.
