The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) said it would reveal on Wednesday whether Microsoft (MSFT.O: Quote, Profile, Research) had won the support needed to have its document format made into a global industry standard.

If Microsoft gets this OOXML format "approved", it will be by irregularities in the voting, it seems. Here's more on what happened in Germany and a report on what is being called a scandal in Norway. And another odd process in Croatia.

Ever since Open Document Format was standardized by ISO and Microsoft started pushing its own “open” format a significant portion of the Free Software community has been buzzing about how bloated, not really open and ultimately redundant Microsoft’s format is and moreover how Microsoft is using various “dirty tricks” to get its format approved as an open standard.

Some countries are switching their votes in the wind up of Microsoft's attempt to achieve ISO status for its Office Open XML formats.

As informed in my penultimate post, I’ve contacted ISO and IEC (actually Mr. Gabriel Barta from ITTF), and he stated that he only “recommended” that the details were not revealed, and that him cannot do anything against it ( nor against Microsoft, or against this poor delegate).

I'm hearing now that Kenya has changed its vote from Yes to Abstain! Kenya is a P-Member. There's also an unconfirmed report that the committee in Denmark has asked Denmark Standards to vote No, after the considerable pressure to change the vote to yes reportedly failed.

anonymous supporters of OOXML use Domains by Proxy registar in order to register a site with a very similar address of Document Freedom Day's. The OOXML support site is Document Freedom Day **dot com** and redirects to a well known astroturf site which pretends to be a community of OOXML supporters.

This is a follow-up post to my recent report on OOXML process in Poland. It looks like things are going bad this time. At least as bad as in September.