NoOOXML

Thanks to Alberto Barrionuevo, who's been tracking the votes as they come in, and putting them onto a world map, we have the map of the First World Wide Format War. In red, the countries that bent to Microsoft's persuasive arguments. In green, those that resisted. We wait for the last few votes to be announced.

Over the next months, expect the map to change! Microsoft will be lobbying the green countries very heavily to get them to change their vote. Whatever country you're in, today is a great day to write a letter to your national board expressing your support for open standards and your desire to see the 300-plus bugs in the Microsoft format, as well as its patent problems, fixed before it is reconsidered for a vote.

Wasn't Norway a no?

According to this report there have also been serious irregularities in Denmark.

Unless, of course, you live in a country where the vote was "abstain" (like me, I'm from Sweden). In that case, your NB has defeated their right to participate in the further process and has no further voice in ISO in this matter.

actually, this is not the case, read the words of the BRM convenor:

"
#Alex Brown | 16 August 2007 at 5:43 pm
@John,

On a point of process detail, ISO have clarified that a "vote" of
abstention in the five-month ballot will allow a country to attend the
BRM, where that vote may be changed to either yes or no…

- Alex."

( http://doyoulovems.com/archives/69#comment-93 )

I suggest it present also P-members and O-members status

Poland submitted 'YES with comments' vote to ISO - http://polishlinux.org/poland/poland-vote-for-microsoft-ooxml/

On August 24th the Trinidad and Tobago committie unanimously voted to abstain. We could not muster the resources to properly evaluate such a large standard in such a short time.

However, Microsoft asked for another meeting. This meeting was held on the 27th. I do not know if they managed to change the committee's position so I do not know what the final vote will be.

I feel that the TTBS may have been used in this regard as we have only just upgraded to P status. I suspect that we were expected to vote Yes.

According to the map, Antartica has abstained?

The map is a nice idea BUT gives a wrong impression of success for the YES to OOXML. It would be more accurate and scientific to correlate the YES and the NO to the number of inhabitants of the related countries, or to the number of inhabitants that have access to a computer. In the first case it makes:

abstain: 393,549,780 inhabitants
no: 3,252,323,818 inhabitants
yes: 1,379,994,887 inhabitants

Feel better ?