Standards Australia has cast a vote to abstain from the ISO/IEC JTC1 ballot to adopt the DIS 29500 Office Open XML format draft standard as an International Standard. The decision to cast an abstain vote from the current ballot follows months of consultation and a clear lack of consensus in Australia on this issue by stakeholders.

In the U.S. vote for Open XML this week, IBM strongly argued against approval of Open XML, and Oracle joined IBM in voting against it. Voting in favor of the Open XML format were Hewlett-Packard, EMC, Intel, Sony Electronics, Lexmark International, and Apple, as well as the Defense Department, Homeland Security, and NIST.

There is no doubt that the stakes in the Open Document Format (ODF) vs. Open XML standardization process are high. Microsoft and IBM have each invested huge sums of money in their version of what the standard should be.

THERE'S MORE news about countries' ISO votes on Microsoft's proposed OOXML document formats ahead of today's deadline for votes to be submitted

t's official. Denmark will vote no with comments on OOXML.

The repeated voting session again was not legitimate, because it was not the secretary but the general manager who sent out the invitation letters,

I have the latest news from Denmark, where Groklaw member elhaard tells me that the recent news about irregularities in the OOXML voting process in Sweden has caused a reaction now in Denmark.

This entire OOXML campaign stinks! This is being forced on everyone simply because one corporation has manufactured a back-door strategy, to maintain a software monopoly.