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.

Vote Yes to OOXML and we'll make sure that you get extra marketing money for you campaigns; this is Microsoft's Sweden's own words when they rounded up their Gold Partners in Sweden. Klas Hammar, Microsoft Sweden now regrets the formulation and regrets that the e-mail was sent out.

Microsoft admitted Wednesday that an employee at its Swedish subsidiary offered monetary compensation to partners for voting in favor of the Office Open XML document format's approval as an ISO standard.

ODF, an international standard, is an open standard for any vendor to implement without restrictions. Massachusetts recently recognizing both ODF and OOXML as document formats, and Denmark running multi-format document trials. the European Commission has endorsed Open Document while various authorities in Austria, Brazil, France and the United Kingdom have adopted applications that support ODF.

" 28 August 2007: about 20 Microsoft partners appeared in the final minutes of yesterday's working meeting at SIS (Swedish Standards Institute) and pushed through a majority for a SIS approval of Microsoft's new OOXML file format as an ISO standard."

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:

"For those who wish to know the gory details, here is a quick way to get them. These eight points are part of a petition circulated by the organization OOXML..."