JD on EP

At the weblog of Ed Brill, Nathan T. Freeman analyzes the voting:

Amongst the 30 "original" JTC1 P-Members : 8 Yes, 14 No, 8 Abstain
Amongst the 11 "late-comers" JTC1 P-Members : 9 Yes, 1 No, 1 Abstain
Amongst the 15 "late-comers" SC34 P-Members : 12 Yes, 0 No, 3 Abstain

Among the original standards voters the Microsoft campaign was clearly doomed.

And of the 26 new voters added during recent weeks, only one voted against Microsoft.

Five will get you ten that half of that camp will commit to cleaning up the format while the other half focuses on stacking a better deck. I have a funny feeling the latter will be more successful than the former with the extra time afforded to do so :)

Eric S. Raymond:

Microsoft's behavior in the last few months with respect to OOXML has been egregious. They haven't stopped at pushing a "standard" that is divisive, technically bogus, and an obvious tool of monopoly lock-in; they have resorted to lying, ballot-stuffing, committee-packing, and outright bribery to ram it through the ISO standardization process in ways that violate ISO's own guidelines wholesale.

If Microsoft succeeds (which is beginning to look likely) they will have not merely damaged the prospects of open-source software, they will have ruined the good name of ISO by corrupting its people and processes. Because if OOXML, with all its huge flaws, really does pass, no one who has been conscious while this was going on is going to believe the process it passed through wasn't a charade bought and paid for by Microsoft marketing.

New York Times: "The fight over the standard, while technically arcane, is commercially important because more governments are demanding interchangeable open document formats for their vast amounts of records, instead of proprietary formats tied to one company's software... Some critics of Microsoft blamed the company's own aggressive lobbying for its defeat."

Wall Street Journal: "The balloting was contentious. Opponents said Microsoft packed national bodies by urging its allies to join standards committees from Italy to Kenya. In Italy, the standards committee swelled from a half-dozen members to 85 in a matter of months. Microsoft responds by saying IBM was stirring up opposition to Open XML. Microsoft's top standards official, Tom Robertson, said he was 'extremely delighted' that the company had support from 74% of the broader group."