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

OS2 World????

[I'm Don Giovanni]

OS/2 World??? LOLOL
Didn't know there were still sites pimping for an OS that's been obsolete for 10 years now.
Anyway, clearly a site advocating OS/2 would have an axe to grind against Microsoft. That's fine, but I'm sure there's an opposing side to this story (not that I expect /. to cover the other side).

And so what if Microsoft partners showed up to vote YES? Obviously those partners intend to use OOXML an want it to be an ISO standard. The stranger thing is that those that are opposed to OOXML being an ISO standard have no intent to use OOXML so why do they care?
Obviously, the reason the care is that they want to use ISO status as a differentiator between ODF and OOXML in lobbying efforts to convince governments to mandate exclusive use of ODF. We all know that this is about politics, not technical merit, and those that deny that are just being disingenuous.

Re:Your Windows monopoly money at work.

[CDarklock]

Buying the outcome is just another game.

Look, face facts: $2500 is roughly dick to the average large company. That's about the salary and benefits of one senior programmer for one week. When you set it up so I can invest that little piddling amount of money and cast my vote, I'm going to vote when it really matters.

The real question here isn't why Microsoft did it - it worked, so it was a perfectly smart and sensible thing to do - but why the opposition couldn't mount a defense. What, you couldn't find fifty people willing to spend $2500 to stop Microsoft? Why not?

Microsoft's partners will not hesitate to lay money on the table so their side wins. Microsoft doesn't have to bribe anyone, or pay anyone, or even encourage anyone. The story right here on Slashdot got to plenty of folks in the partner program who could volunteer $2500 and support the source of their bread's butter. Most of them didn't do it, because they just couldn't be arsed. But across all the media outlets, more than enough of them did.

So where are all the free software people? Surely SOME of you have $2500. After all, it's not the money, it's the PRINCIPLE of the thing - right?

The free software community needs to stop whining about what's fair and start thinking about how to win. Sure, I sit in an office on the Redmond campus, but having more than 40% of the market is bad for everyone - it's bad for the consumer, it's bad for the market, and it's bad for the market leader. I want to see Apple and Linux take a big-ass bite out of this market and give us some competition. But before they can do that, they have to stop all the damn whining and do something that matters.

If a community whines about competition, the very least they can do is to compete.