NoOOXML

Microsoft Puppet countries are leaving the P membership. Lebanon, Turkey, Cyprus, and Trinidad & Tobago have already dropped out. All those countries voted Yes without comments to OOXML.

Time for an iron broom policy. Or Microsoft could get into trouble like Senator McCain.

Microsoft says to the Blender project: "The ISO standard Office Open XML is an example of the direction we are moving towards"

Guess it!

In '04 Hugo Lueders' messages were getting sour. Still some bloggers argue with the self-proclaimed representative of the ...'global ICT industry'. The 'global common sense manufacturers' recommend his clients to embrace reality and logic.

A short summary of the history of Microsoft and the European Union. Closing remarks on the "openness" of OOXML are quite interesting.

It is just amazing to watch a global community in action.

Procurement rules are supposed to be performance based. Mandatory standards as a MS Office 2007 format do not fit. And what about a format as OOXML which official justification is backwards compatibility to the products of a single vendor? a distortion of competition?

OOXML is not the Office 2007 format, yet. Will a proven "ability to tinker" help with ISO OOXML's dissemination, as ISO BRM convenor Brown suggests?

Brinkburn looks into the future of ECMA and ISO. The OOXML case, the analysts warn, appears to be a "precedent that may well enable the breakdown of the formal standards process"

This week a conference in the European Parliament contributed to the debate around the "lock-in" of the European Parliament.

The untold story from Norway.

Today 15th April we are conducting a candle light vigil in bangalore The Candle light vigil demands India to appeal ISO approval of ooxml based on its comments and no vote. We also demands the Department of IT to draft a clear national policy for the use of Free standards for data storage.

SC 34 is fully captured and controls the future of OOXML. New procedural undertakings are made to extend ECMA's privileged access.

People were demonstrating today in Oslo in front of the ISO SC34 meeting against the adoption of Microsoft OOXML as an ISO standard, and especially against the behaviour of Standards Norway, who voted Yes to the specification, despite a lack of support by a majority of the technical committee.

Charles-H. Schulz blogs about the upcoming assaults on OpenDocument format.

Threats are cheap. Especially when it comes to threatening governments who do not use Microsoft's legacy OOXML format for non compliance with the Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT) WTO treaty.

After the vote in Norway moved from a disapproval in the national standardisation committee to a political approval of the OOXML format, upset members of the committee go political and organize a demonstration in Oslo.

Today was the vote in the Technical Committee in Belgium. The room was full of people I had never seen before. But when it comes to vote, the Yes men are there.

Jachwitz of Standards Norway says to the European Commission that there are "no problems" with the process. Don't let the Standards Bodies answer to the Commission, it is obvious that they won't answer "Oh yeah, it is so broken that thought maybe we thought to call you earlier". Tobias Brox of EFN collects some interesting stuff about Norway.