@ Stephen: I’m sure you know this, but just to be 100% certain, Rick Jelliffe is consulting for Microsoft, he was paid by Microsoft to edit Wikipedia, and articles with/about him are anti-open formats. OOXML is not open. It just happens to contain the word “Open”, which leads to confusion.

How could they vote July 31 ? they didn’t review DIS 29500 ( OOXML ) yet. The other NBs are working since March of April. This Portugal process is a shameful joke.

More counterpoints here…
Why the Open Source Community Should Support an ISO Office Open XML
Standard
Rick Jelliffe, O’Reilly Opinion

http://www.oreillynet.com/xml/blog/2007/07/remembering_george_the_animal.html

Of course, since everyone hates Microsoft – “Doom on you OOXML, doom on you”

The whole story is like this:

IIMF (IT Institute of the Ministry of Finance) is the organization that has the delegation for Information Technology activities from IPQ (Portuguese Quality Institute) , the Portuguese member of ISO.
IIMF invited 8 entities for the creation of a Technical Comitee to advice on the activities of SC 34 of JTC1 (Document Description and Processing Language). This first meeting took place last 26th June. Many – but not all – of those entities were traditional Microsoft associates. The president was elected, and is the Microsoft representative.
Many other entities have since written to IPQ and IIMF asking to be admitted to TC, including Sun,
IPQ has decided that any entity wishing to join could do it, but IIMF decided arbitrarily to restricted admission to the first 20, the reason being the size of the meeting room.
So Sun, IBM, IST (the most prestigious Engineering College in Portugal) and 3 others were rejected.

The second meeting of the CT – the first with any real work – took place on 16th July. The agenda included the vote on OOXML, but most of the present decided against a vote on the very first technical meeting of the comitee. That was the incredible suggestion of the President of the TC – vote after 2 hours of discussion.
DIS 29500 (OOXML) started then to be discussed.
Next meeting is going to take place by the end of July.

The Portuguese rules for Technical Comittes says that they should be representative of
a) Business Associations ; b) Trade Associations ; c) User Assoctiations ; d) Professional Associations
e) Public Administration organizations relted to the activity being normalized ; f) Companies, when judged convenient

Instead, in this case, the criteria used was first “anyone that contacted IPQ about DIS 29500″ (meaning Microsoft and associates, and the Ministry of Justice), and then “anyone until the room is full”….. Really.

The person that answered “no room left” is from IIMF, not from Microsoft.

From the outcome of the US and Italian votations, it seems to me this whole MSOOXML maneouver can prove another MSFiaSCO, since it is only devised to undermine the adoption of a true standard (ODF) and to perpetuate and institutionalise (via standarization) M$ lock-in over Office productivity software and formats. Is this what Micrososft understand by “competing”? just as SCO, the Software Patents terror saga at the EU, Microvell and the rest of fudding pacts, the anti-GPLv3 FUD and everything else M$ is doing lately. How much are all these games actually costing to Microsoft and its shareholders?
Wouldn´t that money be better invested in creating actually better products (and not the crap they are hastily managing to put through the “pipe”) that customers really want (and not the DRM and spyware and all the bloat that comes with Windows “Hasta-La-Vista”), instead of trying to force-feed the customers with these defective products through the captive big OEM manufacturers, and rendering their customers’ investments in technology prematurely obsolete ? (Dell has become well aware of it and has started an important defection on the Desktop arena and has accepted to preinstall XP and Ubuntu (now that is listening to your customers, Steve B., take note, hell, compared with Vista I even would say Office2007 is a decent product! Why not providing it with the ability to save as ODF by default and actually compete in a level playfield wit the FOSS offerings? -well you are Microsoft, its too late for you: fair competition is just not part of your corporate mindset (actually, it has never been), so just kidding- ) , just wait for HP, Lenovo, etc, follow Dell’s example…).

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070717-office-xml-hits-a-snag-on-the-way-to-iso-standardization.html

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070717-office-xml-hits-a-snag-on-the-way-to-iso-standardization.html