Microsoft accused of ballot stuffing in standards vote
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Microsoft has been accused of rigging a vote on the ratification of Office Open XML (OOXML) as an international standard at a government body in Sweden.
Swedish internet pioneer Patrik Falstrom has accused Microsoft of bussing in local partners to a Swedish Standards Institute (SIS) meeting on OSI ratification of OOXML. The specification is already used by Microsoft in Office 2003, 2007 and XP
The partners had not participated in the SIS's earlier OOXML discussions but paid their admission fee and gave OOXML a resounding 25 "yes" votes compared to six "no" votes and three abstentions. It was believed OOXML was heading to a certain defeat had Microsoft's supporters not turned out en masse.
Microsoft was unable to comment on the vote at time of going to press.
Falstrom has objected to technical shortcomings in OOXML and asked the OSI to go through Microsoft's proposed specification and mandate changes before signing off. A list of OOXML's issues has been provided here and here.
Falstrom's concerns were echoed in Brazil, where - in a similar vote this weekend - OSI representatives voted "no, with conditions" to ratification of OOXML.
Brazil's Technical Standards Association flagged up 63 problems, but could change its vote to a "yes" should Microsoft actually fix these problems.
These are just the latest controversies in a process that's seen Microsoft accused of attempting to railroad OOXML through the ISO to counter Open Document Format (ODF), and of OOXML supporters trying to change the voting process.
The news of the Swedish and Brazil votes came as Russia's government has become the latest national institution to throw ODF a lifeline and potentially trip Microsoft up in the corridors of power.
The Russian Government has taken a step towards endorsing ODF through an e-government program that would mandate use of software that conforms to "widely used standards" in all government contracts.
According to the Russian Ministry of Information Technologies and Communications "within the project to form an e-government concept in the Russian Federation, support of ISO/IEC 26300: 2006 is planned."
The move has been welcomed by the Open Document Format Alliance, which said in a statement that Russia is "sending a message worldwide that software should be affordable, innovative and accessible, now and for the foreseeable future."®
COMMENTS
The Swedish OOXML vote has been declared invalid!
The Swedish Standards Institute has last night issued a press release where they declared this weeks earlier vote regarding OOXML as invalid and by that Sweden don't have any official position regarding OOXML any more.
According to the press release issued by SIS tonight (the pdf document is created 18:05 CET) the SIS board has declared this weeks earlier OOXML vote as invalid due to that one of the participating companies has voted two times where the SIS rules clearly says that each company can only cast one vote each.
Microsoft had 3 persons to represent them at the SIS meeting and it looks like that Microsoft was the one to voted two times.
Due to this and since it's highly unlikely that SIS will be able to organise a new vote before the 2nd September, Sweden will then not participate in the international vote regarding OOXML.
http://www.os2world.com/content/view/14874/2/
shameful
where is ethics? are NBs working serious or they are commercial proxies?
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re: From the ODF
it does not matter what the ODF says or doesn't, what is going on here is that Microsoft is purchasing it's way into the ISO to become a public standard. As bad/closed/proprietary/crappy as MS-OOXML is, they are corrupting the ISO organizations structure such that they can just pay companies to join the local ISO org and vote for Microsofts MS-OOXML.
Doesn't matter if ODF exists or does not and the ISO needs to stop the process now and stop it in its tracks. They have to know this is going on and the steering committee should end this now before it is too late.
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