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Andy Updegrove has the news that South Africa has filed an official appeal, protesting the approval of OOXML, and their action means that OOXML is now in limbo until the appeal ends:SABS, the National Body member of ISO/IEC JTC1 for South Africa, has filed a formal appeal with both ISO and IEC, challenging the Fast Track adoption of OOXML.
As the ISO announced, the planned ISO/IEC DIS 29500 cannot be published until these complaints have been heard. Procedure requires that they be dealt with by the end of June, when the ISO and IEC have to hand over their comments on the complaints to two management committees for a final decision.
On Friday July 13th, INCITS V1 met via teleconference for 3 hours but failed to reach a 2/3 consensus necessary to recommend an "Approval, with comments" position on Microsoft "Office Open XML" (OOXML) document specification.
An update on OOXML complaints in Europe: Yesterday we mentioned only a quick translation of an article written in Danish. Andy Updegrove and Groklaw have picked it up by now and there is now a minor update on this. It comes from Denmark in the form of another snippet that’s published in English.
Late last month, evidence emerged indicating that Microsoft has used financial incentives to influence the outcome of Office Open XML (OOXML) fast-track approval in various national standards bodies. Although ISO ended up voting against fast-track approval for OOXML, the company's efforts have created doubts about the reliability of the standards process.
Alex Brown recently tweeted to Microsoft's Doug Mahugh the following about OOXML:OOXML=tought [sic] fights; revealed JTC 1 procedures were rubbish. The OOXML approval was marred by procedures that were rubbish, eh? How about the result, then? Wasn't that exactly what the four appeals against adoption of OOXML stated as one basis, that the process was essentially rubbish? Were they right?
We have already seen street protests in a few places including Norway (photo above; here is a video and the full story). The BSI (UK) came under legal fire as well. The European Commission is dealing with several investigations as complaints continue to come (more recently from BECTA, whose formal complaint was added to the pile).
