Ciarán's free software notes

It's now one month since the Geneva Ballot Resolution Meeting. There were complaints about the procedure, and these were refuted by the Convener Alex Brown, but I think it's more important to focus on the substance. By Rob Weir's count, only about 1.5% of problems were fixed at the Geneva meeting.

India subbmitted it's "disapprove" vote last Friday, and I just saw that South Africa has just submitted their "disapprove" vote too. On the other hand, when I checked yesterday, it was looking like the United Kingdom might vote "approve".

In Ireland, a letter from Irish Free Software Organisation called on relevant Irish body to maintain it's "disapprove" vote. No confirmation yet on that.

Meanwhile, the procedure for how to change your vote has been made more complicated, so I hope the national bodies are careful in their submissions. It seems Cuba's "disapprove" vote has already been mis-counted.

And remember, there's still time to phone your national standards body and remind them to submit their "disapprove" vote.

UPDATE: I phone the national standards body of Ireland and was told they won't publish their vote until the deadline - which is midnight Saturday. So it is possible that decisions are being made right up to the last minute, so it *is* worth contacting your national standards body. Also, Groklaw is following this with a few stories and updates to older stories.

I'm still being impressed by the quality of the reports of the ISO Ballot Resolution Meeting that are appearing. When I read the blogs on Monday, I was worried because I thought Microsoft did a top-notch job of spinning it their way. It was only later when someone reminded me to search the mainstream tech media that I saw that, while it may be a masterpiece, nobody's buying it. Every report of the vote is critical.

As a friend pointed out, this is a tectonic shift - Microsoft's credibility has taken a nose dive in the mainstream press. No journalist is willing to reprint Microsoft's version of the story.

Maybe their real feeling about the vote can be seen by their silence about it on microsoft.com (or if there's anything there, it's not prominent) and the silence on the OOXML "community" site.

Two more long, quality post-BRM accounts I'd like to highlight:

• Some clarifications on the OOXML Ballot Resolution Meeting, by Greek delegate Antonis Christofides (with whom I had the pleasure of working on the anti-swapt campaign)
• Art of being mugged, by Rob Weir - part of the US delegation
• And I should add this Vint Cerf interview, on the state of the Internet, but also discussing OOXML (Groklaw)

Some of the key critical statements picked up by the press were from Frank Farance. Farance is a very senior figure in the standards process and was head of the US delegation (which voted against approval) at the meeting. One IDG article quotes him with: "It's like if you had a massive software project and 80 per cent of it was not run through QA [...] I've never seen anything like this, and I've been doing this for 25 years."

All that said, this is just the media battle. The official result of the meeting was approval - albeit with everyone unhappy about the procedure and a lot of questions of validity. The real vote will take place on March 29th. ISO voting members clearly should reject this application for fast track, but it's not at all certain that they will. We have to keep up the pressure on the national bodies to scrutinise this application.

-- 
Ciarán O'Riordan,
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