NoOOXML

Who loses if OpenXML fails to get approval? Only a single party loses, all other parties win (haven't checked the "families" Bill Gates put forward... uhm, well). Durusau tries to make another case. Nice try or in the line of Jeff's pro-"poop"?

OOXML supporters anonymously registered a domain similar to the Document Freedom Day domain in order to, much like many Porn sites, exploit user confusion and to fool visitors into their site.

Yesterday was Document Freedom Day. Document Freedom Day seeks to promote the use of Open Standards in the public sector. Even Microsoft participates.

New business partners are joining the technical committee in Romania. Today 4 of them have joined the committee, all of them seem to be Microsoft partners.

This is a response to Patrick Durusau's recent letter Who loses if OpenXML loses? The only one who loses if DIS 29500 fails is Microsoft, whose Office 2007 cashcow will run into trouble. Everyone else, including the OpenDocument Format, do not need an ISO stamp of approval on DIS 29500. The current Ecma 376 standard, flawed as it is, is more than enough to work with. Read more to find out why.

A quick guide on how to fool the Polish Committee.

Voting Abstention or abstain from voting. A Polish friend says that my source was wrong.

The Brazilian committee maintains its NO vote from September, with a clear technical motivation which makes good advice to all NBs now reconsidering their vote.

Some people change their gender. Doug Mahugh quickly changes hats.

There is almost an "edit war" going on over at the Wikipedia article. Any experts on the sublect would be apprediated! Please help maintain the article in a readable state!

We publish an open letter from Peter Drummond, Australia's IUPAP representative for computational physics and Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science.

Groklaw told "New rules for changing your vote on OOXML. Yup. Like we didn't expect that. I know you don't want your votes to end up ignored, so here's what I think you have to do by March 29". Well spoken. Agreement for disapproval is not enough, your national body needs to vote correctly or the specification might get closer to a pivotal approval. Don't forget that to continue with a BRM for a text with 2300 comments had been their idea -- and to go fast-track with 19 difficulties.

Why should we adopt OOXML as a ISO standard? Reasons unknown as of now. We should demand for them loudly enough so that if they ignore it, many proOOXML voters would be turned down.

Harish Pillay is annoyed by the ISO OOXML process and thinks the conduct infringes upon his professional code of ethics. But his rules just don't apply.

You've written 6000 pages of specification largely in secret (and, I understand, recently added over 1500 more pages) and given the world five months to read, absorb, understand, review, critique, and establish informed positions on it. Worse, whether it happened because of unreasonable methods, pure random chance, or genuine and unexpected interest, the fact that the size of the JTC 1 Subcommittee that was to vote on the document suddenly exploded gives the appearance that somebody was trying too hard to stack the deck...almost as though it wasn't really desired to have too much real review.

In the final ballot today, India voted 'No' to OOXML. It has been a bitterly fought battle for the last week.

This article illustrates the futility and the dangerousness of the heavily publicized Custom XML feature in OOXML.

The article explains that "Backwards compatibility" is actually targeted to CIOs, not software developers.

We got indications that 2 P-members countries were stuffed with Microsoft Business Partners. Those two countries applied for P membership in late August and voted Yes without any comments. Don't be surprised if they are out of reach for the European Commission.

Stephen McGibbon (MS) says Apache POI would get support for OOXML added, Arnaud Le Hors (IBM) stresses the Apache Foundation does NOT support OOXML and Stephen is fine with that.