Just when you think that you have seen the ugliest stories, more of them seem to be arriving (in large volumes at the moment). Here is a quick overview with very little commentary.

From New Zealand:

He says claims that Open XML is a vehicle for protecting old binary formatted documents, the focus of Microsoft's newspaper advertising yesterday, are also false.

This is not the first time that we see newspapers being used for deception or spin.

Comment of interest:

"Microsoft's Brian Jones, sums it up best. The OOXML ECMA spec is not finished yet."

And another:

"Those whores will probably never be seen at a standards meeting again, unless Microsoft has another proprietary standard they want to foist onto the public as 'open'."

And another:

"If they let this sort of manipulation take place without pulling the plug on fast tracking OOXML, it will prove just how inadequet the hole process is and how little it means. ISO will become WORTHLESS."

And another:

"It is a case of a blatant exercise of monopolistic powers and monetary clout. If ISO crumbles under such an underhand onslaught it must surely cease to be a body with any meaning and purpose."

The comments are pretty much the same in all the forums.

Microsoft is said to have just 'pulled a Sweden' in Uruguay. This new petition for UK National Archives does not seem to have people aware of the fact that National Archives is itself run by a Microsoft employee (talk about conflict of interests).

BetaNews writes about the mad events in the Nordic states.

"This is how a standard is bought," Bosson wrote later. "I left the meeting in protest - pissed off."

There is already an article about this (in Swedish) and more information in Groklaw conversations.

He acknowledges that the rules might need to be changed.

Here are some more articles of interest:

The OOXML Problem

Another thing, by introducing a "new fancy" document format, MS can hold a tighter grip round existing customers and get more on the false pretence that they've "opened up".

Linux Foundation Releases Statement Calling for National Bodies to Vote "No" on OOXML

Perhaps enough National Bodies will heed the call of the Linux Foundation to draw a line in the sand, here and now, and even at this eleventh hour, and stop the juggernaut of abuse before it drives the system totally over the cliff.

Rejecting OOXML

All the CIOs say they want is XML documents; unfortunately they aren't as aware as Georg Greve, above, that Microsoft's implementation of XML is exceedingly half-hearted.

Remember the man who was paid by Microsoft to mess about with Wikipedia's article on OOXML? In what appears to me like a stunt he said he would vote "No".

Vote “No”? But aren’t I supposed to be Microsoft’s biggest fanboy? Well, what I mean is a conditional approval, not a rejection.

It seems like a plot which says that "no" votes are actually a "yes, with comments". Bob Sutor warned about such ugly spin.

I’ve heard several reports of supporters of OOXML trying to get national standards bodies to change their votes from “NO with comments” to “YES with comments” because “it’s the same thing.” The logic, which I’ll explain in a later post, is that any comments will trigger a ballot resolution meeting, so there is no need to be so negative and vote NO.

Ecma has clearly lost its reputation and here is more evidence.

Ecma is shepherding Open XML, the default format used by Office 2007 documents, through ISO's traditionally difficult approval process.

To close this post on a brighter note, here's a new article on Malaysia's choice of ODF.

ODF, an international standard, is an open standard for any vendor to implement without restrictions.