08.21.07
ODF/OOXML Watch: Australia, New Zealand, Finland, and the United States
The vote on OOXML’s verdict is approaching. There are still many cases of wrongdoing and the following blog item gives a short and incomplete roundup of the latest observations.
The last two months however have seen reports from various countries questioning the basis on which their votes are being decided. The constitution of the committees and the manner in which the national position is decided seem to me to be flawed.
From New Zealand, the following HTML version of a paper that we previously mentioned (PDF) has finally been published. It explains why only Microsoft can implement OOXML, which makes it unsuitable for standardisation.
This paper examines whether OOXML can be fully implemented by vendors other than Microsoft and concludes that a number of application specific and undisclosed behaviours (as well as a number of other technical flaws) in the
proposed standard make this impossible.
From the UK, an article on OOXML’s setback in the United States has just been published.
In Australia, the following letter of protest was published in response to the nation’s decision. As you may recall, it seemed like a another story where Microsoft ’shoved’ its own people and partners into the technical panel.
“Opposition to the endorsement of the program comes on top of the suspected stacking by Microsoft of a variety of standards bodies in order to get OOXML approved as the ISO standard. “This was not part of OSIA’s submission and is not anything OSIA has direct knowledge of”, said Scott. “However, there are a number of people who assert that Microsoft is doing as you suggest”, he said.”
Updates from Finland [1, 2, 3, 4] are also available thanks to an anonymous reader.
Highlight: Novell was the first to acknowledge that Microsoft FUD tactics had substance. Novell then used anti-Linux FUD to market itself. 
Highlight: Xandros let Microsoft make patent claims and brag about (paid-for) OOXML support. 
Highlight: Linspire's CEO not only fell into Microsoft arms, but he also assisted the company's attack on GNU/Linux. 
Highlight: Microsoft craves pseudo (proprietary) standards and gets its way using proxies and influence which it buys. 
Highlight: The invasion into the open source world is intended to leave Linux companies neglected, due to financial incentives from Microsoft. 
Analysis: Xen, an open source hypervisor, possibly fell victim to Microsoft's aggressive (and stealthy) acquisition-by-proxy strategy.