NoOOXML

The corruption train has reached a summit with the Jordan Institution for Standards and Metrology (JISM) lobbying on behalf of Microsoft. They have sent an email to all ISO P-members asking them to urgently support OOXML, with some information coming directly from Microsoft. A member of the Lithuanian technical committee is nevertheless raising doubt on the competence of the Jordan experts. Jordan does not has a technical committee, only an industry organisation as advisor where Microsoft is a member.

"Members of the free software community should do more" is the conclusion drawned by Tony Mobily on the OOXML fight in his article published on the Free Software Magazine.

Microsoft has stuffed again one more committee in Kenya (P-member) in order to secure a Yes vote, thanks to their puppets. Yet another committee successfully hijacked by Microsoft and their partners.

The Tanzanian Bureau of Standards (TBS) discussed the DIS29500 proposal, under the presence of Nicol Woodard, an american and not tanzanian Microsoft salesman.

Netherlands will abstain on OOXML, since Microsoft seemed to be the only one in the technical committee to do not support a conditional approval (No with comments). The Internet Society Netherlands is also calling for a reform of the ISO process, to be more resistant to such controversial standards, "in order for ISO to maintain relevant".

Anand Vaidya has made a very good presentation about "Microsoft OOXML / ECMA376: Get The Facts" in about 75 slides. This resumes very well the problems with the Microsoft pseudo-standard.

Any idea what the airspeed velocity of an unladen Microsoft office open specification is?

Italy, a "P" member of ISO/IEC whose subcommittee in charge of DIS 29500 was invaded by Microsoft partners, finally has got an ABSTENTION and won't back OOXML as Microsoft looked for.

An article I wrote to explain why multiple standards are bad.

Our correspondent writes, "…our politicians here are corrupt as hell, the general view around is that they are "yes-men" when it comes to lining their pockets or lack of knowledge of the technology… One of the Members of the government is famously known for looking desperately for the Internet Explorer icon when Nicholas Negroponte introduced the OLPC Laptop to the government."

The ISO DIS voting form G18 that National Bodies should use to vote contains another indicative element that they should vote NO if they have technical problems with the standard proposal. Microsoft is trying to convince them to vote Yes with comments, even if those comments are technical.

Microsoft is arguing in every national committee that a long list of software applications and platforms support already the OOXML format, and that it was designed to fulfill new broad features not covered by OpenDocument. Let's see how accurate these statements are...

Australia will probably go Yes with with a Christmas card; comments are still possible until August 21st; Microsoft has a well-organized PR push at these events; Google was there but Sun was not; there were empty seats(!); Microsoft is pushing the idea that multiple standards are fine.

Stephen A. Hockema and Jutta Treviranus of the Adaptive Technology Resource Centre, University of Toronto, look at how OOXML works for persons with disabilities. Their conclusion: the format does not provide sufficient accessibility.

While the vendor tries to beat "OOXML is great" into everyone's head, its own Mac Business Unit can't implement OOXML convertors on time to ship with Office 2008 for Mac. Originally promised for spring 2007, the converters won't even ship with Mac Office 2008, says a vendor spokesman.

They are rumors that some countries (more details soon) might suddenly become P-members, under Microsoft pressure. Microsoft is probably afraid to loose the vote of the P-members, thus they are asking National Bodies of developing countries to quickly become P members. This move can be quickly done. The vote of P and O members is becoming a moving target.

The INCITS executive group has voted by far not to approve ISO DIS 29500. Official bodies like the DoD and the NIST decided to reject the specification because of its deficiencies. Also Oracle, IBM or Lexmark, and the standard association GS1 US. On the other side, Microsoft and its yes-men Apple, Intel and HP. Now ANSI has to decide the final vote of US. Hopefully will take into account the several hundreds of comments provided by the technical group of INCITS, the V1 (no matter if hijacked by the vendor yes-men).

ECMA and Microsoft employees are mentioning that there is a bilateral RFRAND patent licence available for companies that "sometimes have a large commercial operation" and prefer to enter into a bi-lateral license agreement as opposed to relying on a CNS or OSP-like promise.

An anonymous coward explains how the Swiss national board will vote, in a fair and free decision that will think carefully before saying "YES" to Microsoft.

BoycottNovell explains, with clear graphics and labels, why many very important Linux distributors are supporting OOXML. It's very important to understand why big firms like TurboLinux, Corel, Xandros, Linspire, and Novell, believe OOXML is better than hot sliced bread. Read on...