ISO OOXML approval still looking likely (was: Re: OOXML doesn't get support...)

[Ciaran O'Riordan]

At last week's Ballot Resolution Meeting in Geneva, the national bodies had
1,100 issues to resolve.  They resolved 20 to 30 substantial issues and
adopted fixes for about 200 trivial issues, and then had a bulk vote on the
rest.  Only 10 countries agreed to cast a for/against vote and the result
was 6-approve and 4-disapprove.  2 of those countries might actually have
been ineligible to vote, in which case the result would be 4-4.

So there're about 900 problems with MS-suggested fixes which were ticked as
approved without discussion of whether the fixes fix the problems, whether
the fixes clash with each other, whether the fixes are themselves
problematic, etc.  A mess.

Despite this, people who were in Geneva tell me that it still looks
realistic that OOXML *will* get ISO approval.  So it looks like there's one
more month of work to do before the real decision.

I've collected some good press and blog coverage here:
http://fsfe.org/en/fellows/ciaran/ciaran_s_free_software_notes/coming_month_of_ooxml_work

(I hope my above summary is accurate, but I'm no expert on this and I've
been wrong before - the links are in the blog entry are more authoritative
sources.)

-- 
Ciarán O'Riordan (+32 477 36 44 19) \ Support Free Software and GNU/Linux
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