Open Source Weblog

At times it has seemed more like a high school prom Queen election campaign than an approvals process for an international data format standard.

There were reports, for example, of interested parties being denied entry to a meeting in Portugal as the room was too small, despite a larger room being available.

Meanwhile, in Spain, Microsoft was accused by the government of Andalusia of misrepresenting its views on OOXML's potential adoption.

There were also accusations of misleading information being given to national bodies regarding the vote deadline and the way in which comments will be dealt with.

Ballot stuffing by Microsoft partners has been reported in many countries; Norway being one example. Meanwhile Hungary is reportedly reconsidering its yes vote after the voting rules were changed at the last minute.

Meanwhile Microsoft has accused IBM of trying to prevent adoption of OOXML, hyping opposition comments, and attempting to persuade partners to vote against the format.

The bottom of the barrel appears to have been scraped in Sweden where the earlier approval vote has been declared invalid after one of the participating companies voted twice.

Sweden's approval was already shrouded in controversy after a memo surfaced from a Microsoft employee that encouraged partners to sign up and support OOXML in return for “marketing support”.

Whatever the result on Sunday the process will roll on for several more months, and will no doubt get even more acrimonious. Even if OOXML gets approved it will forever be tainted, while the ISO approvals process had also been tarnished by commercial interests.

Microsoft's Jason Matusow recently wrote “at the heart of this remains the idea that making document formats more open is a good thing”. On th contrary, I would argue that the issue of making document formats more open was forgotten long ago.