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Microsoft employee offered incentives for OOXML support (LinuxWorld)

[Posted August 30, 2007 by corbet]

Here's a LinuxWorld story about the OOXML vote end game. "Andrew Updegrove, a well-known backer of the rival Open Document Format for Office Applications (ODF) and an attorney at Gesmer Updegrove LLP in Boston, said Microsoft's tactics make the outcome of the Open XML vote crucial to the future of the technology standards process. 'I personally believe that this result is essential, due to the severe impact that the events of the past several months have had on the integrity of the standards development process,' he wrote in an e-mail."

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Posted Aug 31, 2007 7:34 UTC (Fri) by andka (subscriber, #974) [Link]

Summary:
Some Microsoft guy in Sweden offerd money to companies that registerd as memebers of the Swedish standardisation organization (SIS) and voted yes to the OOXML proposal (which would determine how Sweden/SIS would vote in the ISO vote Sept 2). Lots of companies did that.

On the CoumputerSweden (the source of the story) website, there is a new article saying that the Swedish vote will have to be redone. Not because of the "massive criticism" but for a technical reason. Some organization evidently voted twice. Seems like a simple thing to fix, but the SIS (Swedish standards organization) says that they have to redo the vote.

And, since it will be very difficult to organized a new vote before Sept 2, Sweden (SIS) may not be able to participate in the ISO voting.

Link to the article (in Swedish)
http://computersweden.idg.se/2.2683/1.118680

Microsoft employee offered incentives for OOXML support (LinuxWorld)

Posted Aug 31, 2007 14:27 UTC (Fri) by plg (guest, #47097) [Link]

Same article translated to English:

http://computersweden.idg.se/2.2683/1.118740

Another good link about the whole OOXML debacle

Posted Sep 1, 2007 14:26 UTC (Sat) by pr1268 (subscriber, #24648) [Link]

Wired.com has a related story (dated August 31) about the tactics Microsoft is resorting to in order to get OOXML standardized. This article summarizes the whole mess quite nicely, IMO.