There are some important questions regarding OOXML’s upcoming ISO bid that Microsoft cannot answer or just simply won’t. From 25-29 February 2008 in Geneva, Switzerland, the ISO community will hold a Ballot Resolution Meeting (BRM) of the National Boards to discuss and vote finally on OOXML as an ISO standard. This article raises questions that Microsoft should answer to the satisfaction of the ISO community as part of the deliberation leading up to the BRM vote.

Here at TuxRadar, and in the magazine behind the website, Linux Format, we get a lot of really basic questions from new users. We've taken the most common questions and printed them verbatim below, providing Plain English answers.

The following six questions relate to the application of the ECMA/MS-OOXML format to be accepted as an IEC/ISO standard. Unless a national standardisation body has conclusive answers to all of them, it should vote no in IEC/ISO and request that Microsoft incorporate its work on MS-OOXML into ISO/IEC 26300:2006 (Open Document Format).

"...Mitchell has put together several posts on her blog to answer questions that the community may have. I've digested them below. Enjoy....

Thanks so much to RMS for taking the time to answer our questions and thanks to the community at /r/gnu for all the questions.

At the Linux Collaboration Summit, Microsoft platform strategist Sam Ramji faced some tough questions during a panel about operating systems. He argued that Microsoft doesn't oppose open source software and that collaboration with the open source software community represents an opportunity for Microsoft.

DIN e.V., the German standards institute, has now posted the results of the meeting August 21 by the technical committee. It's a "yes" (or "yes, comments") decision on Microsoft's submission of OOXML as a proposed standard. It's in German, naturally.

Almost all my friends use Windows or Mac. (not many of them are geek like me.) And when I talk to them about Ubuntu (sometimes) they ask various questions.

I first met Bill Gates at the age of twenty. He stood in the yard of his Washington lakefront home, Diet Coke in hand, a tastefully small ketchup stain on his shirt, which no one had the courage to point out, and answered our questions, in-turn, like a savant.