With ISO's Ballot Resolution Meeting taking place Feb 25th-29th, discussion of the OOXML format and the ISO process is heating up again. Here are four documents that were published today (or at least I found them today):

DIS-29500: Deprecated before use? by Georg Greve

http://fsfeurope.org/documents/msooxml-idiosyncrasies.en.html About OOXML's original purpose of preserving compatibility with an idiosyncratic format, how the changes to the format now exclude that compatibility, and how complexity and lack of a re-useable source code reference implementation makes implementation impractical or impossible.

A Pre-BRM Miscellany, by Rob Weir

http://www.robweir.com/blog/2008/02/pre-brm-miscellany.html "Photo ID requirements, badged access to the meeting room, prohibitions against cameras and recording devices, no observers, no press." (thanks to Sean Daly for this link)

Developers warned over OOXML patent risk, by Brett Winterford

http://www.zdnetasia.com/news/software/0,39044164,62037862,00.htm ZDNet Australia article about concern over the means of terms in Microsoft's Open Specification Promise

A picture of a printed copy of the OOXML spec :-)

http://blog.janik.cz/images/OOXMLSpec.png (I hope there was a good reason for making this printed copy. It will surely never be read. At least publicising this picture makes it less likely that someone else will think it necessary to also do a printing.)

FWIW, I put these four links in a blog entry too: http://fsfe.org/en/fellows/ciaran/ciaran_s_free_software_notes/ooxml_already...