This is different. There is a report by Borys Musielak of PolishLinux.org that Poland met to vote on OOXML on Thursday. Of 45 members of the committee eligible to vote, 24 showed up to vote, and it split almost down the middle, with 12 for, 10 against and 2 abstaining. This is extraordinary, since Poland voted yes in September, despite the technical committee being opposed. I call that progress.

Remember I told you I've noticed that people who don't support Microsoft's agenda end up the victim of smear campaigns?... The New Zealand Open Source Society is reporting that an employee at Microsoft recently sent an email to one of the technical bodies advising an NB involved in the OOXML ISO process, smearing a man's reputation

The ODFalliance.org now has a new OOXML Resource Section. Bellow you will find the complete text from “OOXML Implementations: A Community of One”. If anything, the ODF Alliance analysis is too charitable. OOXML is NOT CLOSE TO a community of one. Documents produced by Microsoft Office 2007 are not OOXML (Ecma 376), DIS 29500, or even DIS 29500 as amended at the BRM.

There has been much discussion in the free software community and in the press about the inadequacy of Microsoft's Office Open XML (OOXML) as a standard, including good analysis of some of the shortcomings of Microsoft's Open Specification Promise (OSP), a promise that is supposed to protect projects from patent risk.

In all the talk (and there’s been plenty of talk) concerning the ISO meetings on Office OpenXML (OOXML) one point stands out. The U.S. voted no.

Andy Updegrove has the results in detail here, including a breakdown of the votes. Basically, there were too many proposed changes to be able to cover them in the BRM, so they tried a workaround, but the upshot is ... it's a mess.

Microsoft’s position is hardening as the ISO vote on OOXML (DIS 29500) in Geneva approaches at the end of this month. We know more clearly now how Microsoft and its proxy group, ECMA, will position Microsoft’s OOXML specification in advance of the vote. In short, Microsoft is betting that its influence with National Bodies will allow it to push through a specification which elevates its own interests over that of truly competitive, open international standards. In the end, it will be Microsoft’s own inflexibility that will be its undoing, and that undoing means knocking the OOXML out of approval for ISO status.