More OOXML news. The Cuban National Bureau of Standards has reportedly sent an email to the three names NBs are supposed to notify at ISO, Toshiko Kimura, Keith Brannon, and Martine Gaillen, reporting that Cuba votes to disapprove OOXML.

Where are we now?

Last night was the deadline for filing appeals to the adoption of OOXML by ISO/IEC JTC 1. This morning, a spokesman for the IEC acknowledged the receipt of a total of three appeals by the deadline, with the third and final appeal being filed by India, as reported by Peter Sayers, of the IDG News Service.

China has unanimously voted "no, with comments" on OOXML. As I had noted in an earlier blog entry, China had been signalling some displeasure with Microsoft and OOXML in recent weeks, via Xinhua, the official government news agency, so this is not totally a surprise.

As the March 29th voting deadline on OOXML approaches, Red Hat has announced its support of Open Document Format (ODF) instead of Office Open XML (OOXML).

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

It's all over the news today that OOXML will probably be approved as an ISO standard this week. Plenty of links to the coverage in this discussion on Slashdot. As is now common with OOXML, there are also reports of hair-raising irregularities in the voting processes of various countries.

I think I see a way we could be really helpful to the ISO folks having to sort through all the 10,000 comments the various countries filed with their votes on MS OOXML.

This Sunday, September 2, is the deadline for votes from 150 or so national bodies on whether the ECMA standard based on Microsoft Office Open XML formats should be approved by ISO.