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"With the polls now closed and the early results in (some public, some not), think it's time to predict with assurance that ISO will announce tomorrow that ISO/IEC DIS 29500, the draft specification based upon Microsoft’s Office Open XML formats, has failed to achieve enough yes votes to gain approval at this time..."
The International Organization for Standardization has voted against a proposal to fast-track Microsoft's Office Open XML format as an international standard. Here's how the vote went: all 41 of the of the countries that had worked on the proposal participated in the vote. There were 17 "yes" votes, 15 "no" votes, and 9 abstentions.
Microsoft is being very coy and dishonest this week. Having ensured that Microsoft itself is ‘representing’ entire countries and stealing the election in the majority of them, Microsoft wants the world to believe that over three quarters of ‘the world’ supports OOXML. Of course, it’s a foolish thing to believe and a lie of very great proportions.
FOSS Meet@NITC is an annual event on Free and Open Source Software at NIT Calicut. This event brings together open source enthusiasts from all over india. The 2008 edition of the event is being planned and is scheduled to be held from March 21st to 23rd.
If you are interested in participating in the meet, you will have to register at this site. Speakers may register at this site and post details of talks, workshop or bofs that he/she would like to conduct. They may also post polls to know the audience better. Delegates can post comments and vote on polls. We hope that this way the event can be molded by the participants themselves in the spirit of a true community event. Please feel free to inform us about your queries, suggestions and complaints.
MICROSOFT'S vandalism of Java is well documented and it continues to this date according to the following article, whose author was "kind" enough to include Microsoft FUD from Rob Enderle [1, 2, 3].
Yesterday we wrote about ugly denials by Microsoft and even ISO — denials that shortly afterwards turned out to be bald-faced lies. It new reports are correct, this appears to have also been the case elsewhere, further away from the sight of the western world.
"We are happy to be working with Microsoft on a license for the Java technology and look forward to working with them on optimizing the Java technology for Windows," Sun said in an official release.
Microsoft is telling it in their press release that 74% of all qualified votes approved: "The results show that 51 ISO members, representing 74 percent of all qualified votes, stated their support for ratification of Open XML." That is downright silly.