Remember recent reports about Bill Gates making secret phonecalls? Well, this sort of corruption has not ended.

The government decided to vote together, and to follow NIST (Homeland Security had voted in favor of approval in the previous ballot), so DoD fell in line as well. NIST, you may recall, is an agency of the Department of Commerce (as I reported Steve Ballmer personally called the Secretary of the DOC to urge this result). GS1is a technical association.

I was not going to bring it up here, but anger can be mitigated through humour. A couple of days ago, someone whom I know created this picture [PNG] to show how Microsoft controls Linux vendors by proxy. Here we have a case where Microsoft controls not only entire nations, but also government departments therein. Disgusting.

Update: On the other side of the ocean, despite controversial lobbying, OOXML has just been rejected by the world's largest population. China says "No" (with comments).

It's also interesting in that a large degree of public participation figured into the decision. For example, there is this on-line poll site, which allows anyone to log on to indicate how they thought China should vote on OOXML. As of this moment, the voting was running 92.31% (8294 out of 8985 votes cast) against approval.

China and India, being the huge players that they are, will certainly be a barrier to acceptance of a proprietary 'monopoly enabler'.