NoOOXML

Czech Normalisation Institute (CNI) accepted half of the submitted technical comments to the committee earlier last month.

As it is happening in other countries such as Denmark and Italy, Microsoft is invading the technical committees of each National Standardisation Bodies with their Business Partners puppets.

You don't need to keep software vendors out of ISO standardization procedures. Because they have first hand experiences with OOXML solutions. Salespersons are perfectly skilled to sell Office Open XML to ISO committees because OOXML is essential for them, it is crucial for their business and their customers. Voices for Innovation started a petition in favour of Office Open XML standardization. A website from Microsoft. Micro means small, as in SME (small and medium enterprises).

Brian Jones, the Office XML guy at Microsoft, is pointing out at the strategy of the company to recommend a "Yes vote with comments".

ECMA (essentially a Microsoft proxy) has published a document to counter all the contradictions submitted by countries against the Fast Track. This document can be seen as the core of the counter-arguments by Microsoft to convince National Bodies that OOXML is a good thing. A very informative document on which arguments Microsoft will use to discuss with other stakehoders during the forthcoming meetings.

Microsoft debunks Andy Updegrove. But the truth is: We suggest you to rely on credible sources. <NO>OOXmL gets it right.

Joe Macri, Managing Director of Microsoft Ireland, is sending this email to its customers in Ireland in order to show support for its broken OOXML format at the National Standards Authority of Ireland.

OOXML is now ready for public hearing in Denmark. Comments must be sent to Dansk Standard by july 2nd 2007. For comments form please contact Pia Elleby Lange. Next meeting in committee is scheduled for juli 11th 2007 at 10:00 AM at Dansk Standard.

Microsoft puppets, such as Initiative for Software Choice (CompTIA), or Association for Competitive Technology (ACT), are kicking the ODF bill in California advocating for 'let the user choose'. Does the users really choose their file format? Of course not.

Portugal is another where the Technical Committee seems to be invaded by Microsoft. Some people have forked the petition in portuguese, and they nearly got 500 signatures in less then 36 hours. Waouw!

Phantom or new player? Same old.

Microstone, a stone company that had the global monopoly on the production of stones, went bankrupt in the 19th century. But nobody knows when exactly, the date was saved in an OOXML spreadsheet :-)

We have more then 104 countries, and we don't know what is happening in most of them. What about Pakistan? Oman? Iraq? Russia? Will they vote? When is the deadline to submit comments? I mean one country, one vote is the rule, so every country is important. Let's call your Standardisation Body to find out what is happening...

The petition started last thursday got 10.000 signatures in less than a week. Remember that signing the petition is only a first step, it is more important to submit comments to your standardisation body.

The Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII), said that it was putting up a 2,500 Euro prize in its fight against Microsoft's attempt to gain international standardisation for its Office format.

The SIUG (Swiss Internet User Group) as well as the Brussels Linux User Group (BxLUG) have sent comments to their National Standardisation Bodies before the deadline.

The DIN Deutsches Institut für Normung e. V. is calling for interested people to participate in this work

Rumors coming from differents sources are mentioning that Intel is supporting OOXML in some countries, and want to defend the application of the standard to become an ISO norm. Intel and Microsoft used to be a good tandem in the past, and they are still probably in tandem today. Intel was also an ECMA member, and voted for the ECMA-376 specification.

FSFE is asking 6 questions to all standardisation bodies: "The following six questions relate to the application of the ECMA/MS-OOXML format to be accepted as an IEC/ISO standard. Unless a national standardisation body has conclusive answers to all of them, it should vote no in IEC/ISO and request that Microsoft incorporate its work on MS-OOXML into ISO/IEC 26300:2006 (Open Document Format)."

I invite you to read the comment on my previous post in Denmark, where I was suspecting all of those companies to be Microsoft puppets. I was not far from the truth.