[A2k] ISO Press Release: Ballot resolution meeting on ISO/IEC DIS 29500 standard

[Marko Loparic]

Hi,

On 20/02/2008, Thiru Balasubramaniam <thiru@keionline.org> wrote:

>  Ballot resolution meeting on ISO/IEC DIS 29500 standard
>  National delegations from 37 countries will be participating in a
>  ballot resolution meeting in Geneva, Switzerland, on 25-29 February
>  2008 on the draft international standard ISO/IEC DIS 29500,
>  Information technology =96 Office Open XML file formats.

The site

    http://www.noooxml.org

brings a lot of information about this broken and unfortunate format
that Microsoft is desperately trying to push as an ISO standard. A
summary of the arguments against it appears in the petition text:

    http://www.noooxml.org/petition

A large number of irregularities showed up in the process. That is
what happened in Sweden for instance (quoting
http://www.noooxml.org/irregularities):

"The working group within SIS responsible for DIS 29500 was originally
9 members, later expanded to 12. The group had discussed DIS29500 for
months, and was reportedly very likely to decide on "disapprove with
comments", with a reasonably sized list of agreed-upon comments. At
the final meeting, 23 new members (Google Sweden plus 22 Swedish
Microsoft partners) showed up and registered for participation.
Instead of reaching a consensus on "disapprove with comments" a vote
was forced, and the result was, not surprisingly, "approve" without
comments. With this sudden last-minute change to the committee, the
vote was effectively bought by Microsoft partners, and all the work in
the committee was ignored. Registration for SIS and group membership
was SEK 17,000 per member (approx. EUR 1,700), so the vote was changed
by paying for 22 members, a total of less than =8040,000.

Immediately after the vote, an e-mail was leaked to the press. In this
e-mail, a Microsoft employee urged partners to show up, register and
vote yes at the final SIS meeting. Promises were made to compensate
them for the cost of registering, by giving them extra marketing
support and access to Microsoft technology. "

Marko