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Baseless accusations of bribery, et al, might be considered personal attacks by those on the receiving end.

The problem is that your accusations of bribery, et al, are so vague, that you're painting everyone that voted YES with the "corruption" brush. I wish you guys would man up and make a specific corruption charge against specific individuals.

For example, the Czech Republic's expert, Jiri Kosek, explained in great detail why the Czech Republic switched from NO to YES:
http://xmlguru.cz/2008/01/ecma-response-to-czech-ooxml-comments

Well, according to you guys, nobody in his right mind would switch from NO to YES without being bribed (or whatever), so let's get specific. Are you accusing Jiri Kosek of accepting a bribe, yes or no?

Sure, it's easy to accuse Microsoft of bribing "people" (since Microsoft is hated around here anyway, such a vague accusation will increase your karma), but bribery it is a two-way street. By accusing Microsoft of bribing people, you are also accusing someone of accepting those bribes. Don't you think that those that voted YES have a right to be offended by your accusations that they took bribes?

If you would make specific charges, naming the individuals that accepted bribes (and provide some details, like the dollar amounts that changed hands), then you'd have more credibility, wouldn't be painting everyone with the "corruption" brush, and would give those specifically accused a chance to defend themselves. But as it is, you guys don't have the evidence or guts to make specific charges against specific people (like Jiri Kosek), so you make these vague unsupported charges.

For example, the Czech Republic voted NO in September, but switched to YES. Why? Because nearly every one of their issues have been addressed now. http://xmlguru.cz/2008/01/ecma-response-to-czech-ooxml-comments Do you really expect the Czech Republic to continue to oppose OOXML when nearly all of its objections to the original spec have been fixed? Why would they do that? The problems were fixed, so they switched to YES, and this was the case with many countries (those without a political agenda).

Were they fixed? Really? Like the other 98% of the comments, that were "fixed" even nobody reading the "fix" due to lack of time?

Did you know that they had to vote NO if any one of their issues weren't fixed? "Nearly every one" doesn't cut it. Also, they could vote NO even if all of their issues were solved just because they discovered a new one, or because they think some other problem that wasn't fixed is important.

Now, how did the Czech Republic know that their issues were fixed if nobody readed the final document before voting?

ECMA already provided proposed resolution for 75 comments (out of total 75 Czech comments). This means that 100.00% of Czech comments were handled by ECMA.

90.67% of comments were satisfactory resolved.

8.00% of comments were resolved only partially.

1.33% of comments were not satisfactory resolved. ... ...
In fact I was really surprised how many "green boxes" are there at the end. I was expecting that ECMA will properly address only part of our comments. The vast majority of Czech comments was addressed by ECMA so it is time to say yes to OOXML.

You bring up this link: http://xmlguru.cz/2008/01/ecma-response-to-czech-ooxml-comments

Have you actually tried to open the PDF files with "Proposed dispositions" that the page links to? You cannot, because they are password protected. No one knows what these dispositions are, and even if they exist at all. We only have to believe the words of this so called "expert" and have no way to check them.

ECMA already provided proposed resolution for 75 comments (out of total 75 Czech comments). This means that 100.00% of Czech comments were handled by ECMA.

90.67% of comments were satisfactory resolved.

8.00% of comments were resolved only partially.

1.33% of comments were not satisfactory resolved. ... ...
In fact I was really surprised how many "green boxes" are there at the end. I was expecting that ECMA will properly address only part of our comments. The vast majority of Czech comments was addressed by ECMA so it is time to say yes to OOXML.

How will this work with specifications that say "render text like Word 98?"

As covered in this link, it appears that most of these specifications have either been removed or documented. What this does mean is that perhaps it will be possible to truly understand what these formatting hooks refer to, not what MS have documented them as referring to...

(Thanks to zmotula for the link)

The worst proprietary 'hooks' such as 'footnoteLayoutLikeWW8', 'lineWrapLikeWord6' and 'useWord97LineBreakRules', appear now to have been documented - see this link. This in effect means that some of the quirkier behaviour of old versions of MS Office may now have been made public (difficult to say for sure as the ECMA resolution is behind a passworded site).

Microsoft would make their, and everyone else's, lives a lot easier if they went the whole way and documented the entire depreciated office formats, allowing others to write filters to correctly interpret them. This would also give them a foothold in claiming that the tags above truly do point to an open format, since the behaviours they refer to would be openly documented.

But let's not hold our breath.

...see the post by the guy who evaluated the OOXML specification for the Czech Normalization Institute. This means that Czech Republic is most probably going to vote for OOXML when the time comes.