Mr János Kóka, Minister of Economy and Transport, has sent a mail to György Pónyai, General Director of Hungarian Standards Institution (HSI), about its the Hungarian vote on OOXML issue.

The extent to which Microsoft can go in its efforts to get OOXML is interesting. Microsoft has "persuaded" several non-profit organizations to bombard the Indian IT Secretary and the Additional Director General of the Bureau of Indian Standards with letters supporting its OOXML proposal.

Microsoft is urging Indian NGOs to support OOXML (i.e. Office Open XML) format - and persuade Indian IT Secretary and the Additional Director General of the Bureau of Indian Standards with letters supporting MS’s OOXML proposal.

13 members of the TC in Norway has left their Standards Body in protest. They say that the Standards Body has lost its credibility in the IT area. Remember that Standards Norway was voting Yes with the support of only 2 companies (Microsoft and Statoil), and against the will of the rest of the technical committee.

Bill Gates has reportedly been making phone calls to the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of Commerce to push the American National Standards Institute to ignore the votes of its advisory committees and vote "yes" on ISO standardizing Microsoft's Open Office XML (OOXML) format, the one in competition with the OpenDocument Format (ODF) pushed by IBM and Sun.

Microsoft has hailed the ISO's acceptance of the Microsoft Open Office XML despite controversy in standards communities about voting irregularities. The new vote reverses last year's rejection of OOXML. Norway's Standard Norge dismissed members and three staff members reversed a no vote. Other countries also reported OOXML voting problems.

As you will recall, the Executive Board (EB) of INCITS, the US voting body on OOXML in the ISO/IEC JTC1, posted two simultaneous, seven day written ballots - one to approve, with comments, and one to abstain, again with comments. The votes have now been received back. and are as follows:

Readers are encouraged to phone their standards bodies now, in order to pull another nail off OOXML's ISO coffin.

It's been a while now, and I'm still trying to enforce HZN (Croatian national standards body, or CSI) to disclose the information on members of their TC that voted unconditional yes for Microsoft OOXML. It's no more about OOXML. It's about transparency, about my right to know who are the people that declare standards, and about my right to hold them responsible for their actions.