Microsoft Bought Sweden's ISO Vote on OOXML?

a_n_d_e_r_s writes "The vote on OOXML looked fairly secured. Most in the Working Group in Sweden was against the vote to approve OOXML. The day of the vote, though, more companies showed up at the door. Some 20 new companies — each one payed about $2500 to be allowed to vote — and vote they did ... for Microsoft. Most of the new companies were partners from Microsoft who suddenly out of the blue joined the Working Group, payed membership fees and voted yes for approval. From the OS2World story: 'The final result was 25 Yes, 6 No and 3 Abs and this would from the start be a done deal of saying No! Jonas Bosson who participated in today's meeting on behalf on FFII said that he left the meeting in protest and so did also IBM's Swedish local representative Johan Westman.'"

Comments

products are not poor, they are sh#t

[wardk]

prove me wrong fanboys, after you're done rebooting

What part of "capitalism" don't you understand?

[athloi]

The F/OSS people make themselves look like ninnies by whining over this. Capitalism is war for the most profit, by any means necessary that aren't illegal. This wasn't illegal. They won. Either change the rules, or stop complaining.

Re:Probably Stupid Question

[KarmaMB84]

The ODF supporters are trying to use open standards as a weapon against Microsoft. If Microsoft's format becomes an open standard, then all the effort put into ODF and lobbying for laws requiring government use of open standards will be a big waste. If OOXML becomes a standard, they won't be able to sue governments with open standards laws into using ODF...

Re:How to defend against this

[mcrbids]

Next time you have a solution, put your black hat on and see if you can break it in under 15 seconds of honest thought.

Sorry to break the news to you, but you can't wait 6 months in 15 seconds.

(You could have, this time, several different ways.)

Nice. Implies that you have "several different ways", yet you provide none. Come back when you have something to say.