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you're missing the more significant reason why. Both independent claims have the following requirement:

wherein all of the text of the document is stored within text elements such that only the text of the document is contained between start text tags and end text tags; wherein there are no intervening tags between each of the start text tags and each of the corresponding end text tags

This means that document formats that use a HTML-like mixed content model to do their formatting aren't affected by the Microsoft patent, and that includes ODF.

That's a very good point; thank you for pointing this out! I've added a link to your comment at the bottom of my article under "Notes on feedback from readers".

The claim about the MS patent affecting ODF is not true. See here for details.

I don't know what precisely you mean when you refer to "much of religion", but it can't be the Christian faith as described in the Bible, which makes very clear that belief in "free will" is not part of the Christian faith, see e.g. Exodus 9:16 and Romans 9:17ff.

However moral responsibility for one's actions is an essential part of what the Bible teaches. You can be morally responsible for what you do even if your will isn't totally, entirely free. Such moral responsibility requires only the ability to consciously veto proposed actions that the unconscious part of the mind is proposing, and this veto ability has in fact been experimentally observed, See Benjamin Libet: "Do We Have Free Will?", Journal of Consciousness Studies, 6, No. 8--9, 1999, pp. 47--57.

Therefore, free will and moral responsibilty are not the same thing. It is true that some people have been preaching a version of Chrstian religion which is based more on philosophical assertions like "free will" than on what the Bible actually says, but that is not a valid argument against religion. It only demonstrates the foolishness of listening to people who try to base religion on human philosophy instead of focusing on what the Bible says.

I don't know what precisely you mean when you refer to "much of religion", but it can't be the Christian faith as described in the Bible, which makes very clear that belief in "free will" is not part of the Christian faith, see e.g. Exodus 9:16 and Romans 9:17ff.

However moral responsibility for one's actions is an essential part of what the Bible teaches. You can be morally responsible for what you do even if your will isn't totally, entirely free. Such moral responsibility requires only the ability to consciously veto proposed actions that the unconscious part of the mind is proposing, and this veto ability has in fact been experimentally observed, See Benjamin Libet: "Do We Have Free Will?", Journal of Consciousness Studies, 6, No. 8--9, 1999, pp. 47--57.

Therefore, free will and moral responsibilty are not the same thing. It is true that some people have been preaching a version of Chrstian religion which is based more on philosophical assertions like "free will" than on what the Bible actually says, but that is not a valid argument against religion. It only demonstrates the foolishness of listening to people who try to base religion on human philosophy instead of focusing on what the Bible says.

You could try to appeal at the ISO/IEC JTC1 level based on the differences between what the ISO/IEC JTC1 directives say and how things were actually done. I have written up an analysis in which I come to the conclusion that an appeal which is based only on this kind of discrepancies will not be successful.

What I suppose could be done with some chance of success is to file an antitrust lawsuit as well as an appeal and demand in the appeal that ISO/IEC shall defer to the result of the antitrust lawsuit. (Trying to get the standardization organization officials to decide the antitrust concerns themselves would not be a good idea IMO, since standardization organizations are really not equipped for resolving legal conflicts).

However, how valid are those votes? For example, the ISO/IEC JTC1 directives seem to pretty explicitly forbid changing the vote from "disapprove" to "abstain" like AFNOR (the French standardization organization) did (under the influence of heavy lobbying from Microsoft and HP).