Ciarán's free software notes

Links: India-pats, Clipperz, FreeGIS, RMS, Emacs

Fr, 04 Jul 2008 11:37:35 +0200

Proposed changes to India's patent approval manual, along with comments from Redhat, Microsoft, etc.
The Clipperz project's call for privacy and software freedom in webapps, including input from Stallman
FreeGIS.org - a site collecting info about free mapping/geographic data projects. I haven't had the time to poke around much, but there's a database page where you can view the projects in their database that match various criteria.
"It's not the Gates, it's the bars" - article by RMS published by BBC. [UPDATE: Ken Guest sent me a good link where Gates admits that access to source code was needed to make him the hacker he became]
Steve Yegge's Emacs tips, and Phil Sung's Emacs tips

See also: Yesterday's links - the archive of my Links posts.

--
Ciarán O'Riordan,
Support free software: Join FSFE's Fellowship

Using and writing Emacs 22 input methods

Do, 03 Jul 2008 13:32:57 +0200

Emacs 21 had a generic function called iso-accents-mode for writing âççéntèd çhàrâçtërs, but that was removed in Emacs 22. It took me a while, but I found the replacement was to use set-input-method, and then select whichever language you want to be able to type the accented characters of.

The default keybinding for set-input-method is not very convenient (C-x RET C-\), and I almost always use the same input method, so I put this small helper function in my .emacs and bound it to an easy key sequence:

(defun ciaran-toggle-french-input-method () "toggle between French and no input method" (interactive) (if (string= current-input-method "french-alt-postfix") (set-input-method nil) (set-input-method "french-alt-postfix"))) (global-set-key [?\C-c ?.] 'ciaran-toggle-french-input-method)

Sometimes I need Dutch characters, but the "dutch" input method contains some completely unnecessary conversion sequences which make it frustrating to use. And sometimes I want the "á" character so I can write my name properly. So what do I do if I want a personalised input method?

About modifying input methods, the Emacs Lisp Reference Manual just says "How to define input methods is not yet documented in this manual". So I went to the Emacs page on sv.gnu.org, checked out a CVS copy of the emacs source, grepped around, and found that the Dutch input is defined in the file /emacs/leim/quail/latin-alt.el. Looking inside, it's not so complicated.

Here's a minimalist example of what you could put in your .emacs to create your own very basic input method:

(quail-define-package
"ciarans-chars" "MYlanguage" "MY" t
"Ciaran's personal input method defining only the
conversion sequence he wants
" nil t nil nil nil nil nil nil nil nil t)

(quail-define-rules
("\"a" ?ä) ;; LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH DIAERESIS
;; remember to comment your code, if you like :-)
("\"e" ?ë) ;; LATIN SMALL LETTER E WITH DIAERESIS
("a'" ?á) ;; LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH GRAVE
)

For more information on those two quail-* functions, you can get help in the usual way with C-h f and then type the name of the function at the prompt. If you want to test the above code, just paste those two code snippets into an Emacs buffer and run M-x eval-last-sexp after each. Then you can select the "ciarans-chars" input method, and you can read about the input method by pressing C-h I and typing "ciarans-chars" at the prompt.

You will also see that, like with the existing input methods, when you type the first character of what could be a conversion sequence (in the above example, this is just " or 'a'), you will see in the minibuffer which characters could follow it to cause both characters to be converted into another character. So with ciarans-chars, when you type " the minibuffer will display: "[ae].

Looking at the source in /emacs/leim/quail/latin-alt.el should give you ideas for what other conversion sequences you'd use, and the other files in that directory contain the conversion code for more complex alphabets.

Me, I'll make a minimal input method for the characters I use from French, Dutch, plus the Irish a-fada "á". I filed a bug report about the current Dutch input method, but seeing how uncomplicated it is, I might be able to fix it and submit a patch now.

--
Ciarán O'Riordan,
Support free software: Join FSFE's Fellowship

OpenStreetMap is doing great

Mo, 30 Jun 2008 14:56:44 +0200

I was impressed recently by the progress of OpenStreetMap (OSM). The maps of most big cities (in Europe at least) are already very complete, e.g. Dublin and Brussels. Many smaller cities and cities in less developed countries are still in need of work, but the current status clearly proves that the project's aims are practical.

Why is having freely reusable maps important? For one thing, they can be used by other community projects such as Wikipedia. Another advantage is that rather than trying to make it difficult to copy their data (like the corporate map providers do), the OSM website provides lots of features to export their maps. (If you want to link to an OSM map instead of exporting an image, use the "Permalink" link in the bottom right-hand corner.)

When you export an image from OSM, there's no copyright notice or attribution info (which seems like a mistake to me), so when you use OSM maps, consider adding a link or some text to tell people where you got the map from.

The current licence used for the mapping data is the Creative Commons by-sa-2.0 licence. There are constant discussions about changing the licence - not because people disagree with the ideals of that licence, but because there is debate among legal experts as to whether that licence is valid for mapping data and would work worldwide. For people intrested in that sort of thing, there's a very good summary written by Richard Fairhurst in January 2008.

To get involved, there's info on their Beginner's Guide. You might also find an existing OSM group in your area by checking the Mapping projects page on their wiki. I've recently borrowed a GPS handset, so I'm hoping to be able to post more info in the future about how it all works.

On the Event Calendar on their wiki, there's a list of upcoming events including their annual conference which will take place in Limerick, Ireland on the weekend of July 12th and 13th.

According to their software licensing policy and the FAQ, all OSM software is free software, using the GNU GPL by default.

In other news, the OpenMoko Neo Freerunner is heading for large scale production. I've heard it's far from being ready for daily use, and you should be comfortable with installing and upgrading software. So this version is mostly for hackers, but if you're interested in mobile phones powered by free software, OpenMoko is the free-est available. There's a group discount when people in one region order 10 phones. Because it has built-in GPS and all the software is free software, I'm hoping it will increase the number of OpenStreetMap contributors.

--
Ciarán O'Riordan,
Support free software: Join FSFE's Fellowship

Launching your favourite editor in Firefox

Mo, 23 Jun 2008 14:25:49 +0200

After a bit of tweaking, I'm now happily using the the It's All Text! plugin to let me to edit webpage text boxes with Emacs. It also works with other text editors. [UPDATE: Actually, my browser is Iceweasel, not Firefox. See the Mozilla software rebranding article on Wikipedia, and the IceCat project]

To configure it, go to Tools->It's All Text!->Preferences in Firefox's menu bar. In the editor field, when I added some command line options to make Emacs start quickly, it gave me the error "Unable to open your editor". So I made a "quickmacs.sh" file and told It's All Text that that that was my editor. In quickmacs.sh, I put:


#!/bin/sh

gnome-terminal -t "QM $1" -e "emacs -nw -Q --load ~/software/tb.el $1"

The second "$1" is essential. I want Emacs in non-gui mode, so it has to be launched by a terminal program because It's All Text! doesn't run the given editor command in a terminal. tb.el is a a cut down version of my emacs.el. It just contains the minimal convenience settings I want for editing textboxes:


(transient-mark-mode t)

(show-paren-mode t)

(menu-bar-mode 0)

(defun ciaran-turn-on-french-input-method ()

         "set the input method to French"

         (interactive)

         (set-input-method "french-alt-postfix"))

(global-set-key [?\C-c ?.] 'ciaran-turn-on-french-input-method)

(longlines-mode t)

There were two other interesting plugins. The first is EmbeddedEditor 0.1, but you have to make an account and log in if you want to download it, so I ignored it. The second is Firemacs, but that's adding some Emacs features to Firefox - I prefer to have a full Emacs.

--
Ciarán O'Riordan,
Support free software: Join FSFE's Fellowship

Wikimedia board vote 2008 ends midnight Sunday

Fr, 20 Jun 2008 16:59:13 +0200

Elections for one community seat on Wikipedia's nine-person Board of Trustees will close at midnight on June 21st. I'm eligible to vote, and, for reasons I'll discuss next week, I have a sudden interest in communiy voting.

The criteria for eligibility to vote are that you have a certain number of edits to a Wikimedia project. Almost 2.5k votes have been cast so far.

I don't know any of the 15 candidates, so I had to draw up some criteria. The candidate statements were only a minor source of information. What's important for me in a candidate? I wrote everyone's name on a page and made notes about them on three criteria.

Activity levels on Wikimedia projects. Unless someone has been active in contributing to Wikimedia projects, it would be difficult for them to know the issues that affect the editing community. So they should have at least a few thousand edits.
Language abilities, for two reasons. First is that while the English Wikipedia is very good, the quality quickly drops when you read the smaller Wikipedias. So I think there should be more focus on the non-English Wikipedias. Second, because there are so many Wikipedia's, coordination is necessary. To be a good coordinator among projects of many different languages, it helps to be multilingual. Judging someone's language abilities is hard, but I think being able to contribute paragraphs of text in a language is a very good criteria for being "capable". So I mostly ignored what language abilities the candidates claimed in their statements, and instead judged their language abilities based on how much they have contributed to non-English Wikipedias.
Responses to questions. 50+ questions were put to the candidates. I didn't have time to read all their answers, and I found that most answers didn't give me much to base a decision on. But, there was one candidate that I quickly flagged as obnoxious, and two candidates that I flagged as insufficiently interested (since they didn't answer most questions), and for some of the candidates I put a number beside them if an answer impressed me.

The four candidates that I favour are, in no particular order:

It's interesting to note that all 15 candidates are male, and almost all are from Europe or North America. Voting ends midnight Sunday June 21st.

UPDATE June 30th: the results are online. I'm very happy to see that Ting Chen won. 3019 votes were cast.

--
Ciarán O'Riordan,
Support free software: Join FSFE's Fellowship

Updating Debian keys for the uninterested

Di, 20 Mai 2008 11:44:04 +0200

Despite having an aversion to configuring and maintaining security and crypto software, I accepted that I had to update my system in response to the recent big Debian security problem. If I can do it, you can do it. Below are my notes, but keep in mind that my security rank is somewhere between ignorant and uninterested.

For Debian's advice about about updating your system, see:

Debian's "Key Rollover" page - as far as I can tell, "key rollover" is there term for updating your keys. It's a pity they don't use plain language or explain this.
http://wiki.debian.org/SSLkeys - a Debian wiki page with info on how to do "key rollover" on various pieces of software.
Debian's initial security advisory: DSA-1571-1 openssl.

Some good news is that GnuPG and GnuTLS are not affected. By coincidence, GnuTLS fixed some other security problems yesterday, so upgrading your GnuTLS in the near future would be a good idea, but there's no need to regenerate any keys.

To fix the OpenSSL problem, you have to do two things. First you have to upgrade the package "libssl0.9.8". Then you have to check your system for weak keys and regenerate them if there are any.

About updating the "libssl0.9.8", remember to mention that package explicitly. I originally just upgraded "ssh" and "openssl", thinking that the necessary packages would be automatically be updated because they're dependencies, but they're not. So, explicitly update "libssl0.9.8". It's probably a good idea anyway to update "ssh", "openssl", "openssh-client", and "openssh-server". So that's five packages to upgrade, but the most important is "libssl0.9.8".

Next is to scan for weak keys. You do this with either the "dowkd.pl.gz" perl script, which is published by the Debian Security team. Or you can use the "ssh-vulnkey" program which you get when you install the "openssh-blacklist" package (UPDATE, May 27th: the "ssh-vulnkey" utility is now in the "openssh-client" package). Of these two, I used dowkd.pl.

Optionally, if you want to confirm that the dowkd.pl.gz that you're downloading is really the official Debian scanning tool, you can do this with GnuPG's "--verify" command. For this, you will need dowkd.pl.gz.asc (the signature of the scanning tool). This is described in more detail in a section of the above linked Debian wiki page. That .asc file is the signature for dowkd.pl.gz (not for dowkd.pl), so remember to do the verification before you unzip dowkd.pl.gz.

Next you run "perl dowkd.pl help" at the command line. From there, you choose your options. For me, since I'm the only user on my computer that uses ssh, I ran "perl dowkd.pl user ciaran". I was told I had two weak keys. I manually deleted the four files (public and private key for each of the two weak keys):

~/.ssh/id_rsa
~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub
~/.ssh/id_dsa
~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub

And then I generated a new RSA key with "ssh-keygen" and a new DSA key with "ssh-keygen -t dsa".

I then ran "perl dowkd.pl user ciaran" again to verify that my new keys were not weak, and it told me I had zero weak keys. Success.

Lastly, I had to update my public key on some remote hosts. For example on sv.gnu.org, CVS write access requires a DSA key. So I went to my profile, deleted my old key and then submitted my new DSA public key (~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub).

That was all. I hope these notes encourage some others who similarly hate security to actually fix their systems. I hope it saves some people a bit of time or frustration. And I hope I didn't give too much bad advice that would make real security people cringe :-)

(email me on ciaran at fsfe.org if there is anything cringeworthy)

--
Ciarán O'Riordan,
Support free software: Join FSFE's Fellowship

OOXML Yes vote questions and complaints

Fr, 16 Mai 2008 11:53:53 +0200

IFSO member Ben North has sent a Freedom of Information Act request regarding Ireland's change to a Yes vote to the National Standards Authority of Ireland. The request has been received and we're told it's being acted on. Letters sent by IFSO during the ISO consultation can be found on IFSO's correspondence page.

Becta in the UK have sent a complaint to the EU about the UK's Yes vote. This story was also covered on channelregister.co.uk.

And now I see that "the city of Aarhus" in Denmark have registered a complaint about Denmark's Yes vote. (From Groklaw's newspicks)

All is not over yet and OOXML may come out of this with a very negative image. Background info can be found on FSFE's open standards page.

UPDATE May 27th: South Africa has complained to ISO.

UPDATE May 30th: Brazil is now complaining too.

--
Ciarán O'Riordan,
Support free software: Join FSFE's Fellowship

Working breakfast on Community Patent

Do, 15 Mai 2008 12:26:34 +0200

Here's a report from a breakfast meeting I was at yesterday on the topic of SMEs and the Community Patent. There were 50 seats, all full. The speakers included representatives from the Commission, the Parliament, and the Slovenian EU Presidency.

The most interesting part was the speech by a Director of the European Commission. She talked about its possible adoption, the motivations, translations, and she responded to my question about software patents. (Each topic has a section title if you want to skip some parts.)

Possible adoption

About the possible adoption of this proposal, she talked about this being one final attempt. The question of how realistic this proposal is is an important one since the EC have been making proposals on this since 1962 without success. She said that only one country is still openly opposed to the current proposal: Spain. France is not supporting the proposal, but that's only because they're not willing to start an open conflict with Spain. So if Spain can be convinced to change their position, then agreement could be possible quite soon. Me, I hope Spain continues to block this until all the problems are fixed.

Motivations

On motivations, she gave an example of an unnamed large European tyre manufacturer. I'll paraphrase slightly. This manufacturer applied for patents in it's core markets which were the UK, Italy, France, and Germany. Then they heard that a shipment of tyres was to arrive in Antwerp and that those tyres used the patented idea. The European tyre manufacturer phoned the Belgian authorities and asked them to stop the shipment in Antwerp, but the Belgian authorities refused. The allegedly infringed patent didn't exist in Belgium. It only existed in the UK, Italy, France, and Germany. The arrival of the tyres in Belgium might not be a big problem (given that Belgium isn't a core market for them), but because the EU has reduced borders, these tyres could easily be transported into the UK, Italy, France, or Germany.

I don't have a position on the patentability of tyres, but this example is interesting because it's quite easy to understand. When we're making proposals for how to avoid harming software developers, we have to keep in mind what the possible legitimate goals of the legislation are. That allows us to make proposals that face less resistance.

Another interesting point is that when telling the tyre story, she kept referring to this as "counterfeiting". I'm not sure if that was just an accidental wrong choice of word or if this is a hint at a plan to link the ideas of patent infringement and counterfeiting, or even a plan to broaden the definition of "counterfeiting".

Translations

On translations, she said most countries were now satisfied with the proposal to have patents only in English, French, and German. Unofficial automated translations would be provided in the other languages of the EU. She acknowledge the general low quality of automated translations but said that the EPO had now developed some amazing new software for automated translations.

This made me think of a comment about ODF and OOXML compatibility: To sway votes, it doesn't have to be technically possible, it just has to be politically possible. Heh.

Software patents question

At question time, I asked: When I talk to SMEs in the field of software, they say they want fewer or no software patents. We have to remember that every patent is a regulation. Every patent is bureaucracy. The software patents that exist today, although dubiously legal, are making product development difficult. They are particularly problematic when they block the use of a standard, thus prevent others from writing useful software. Wouldn't a faster, cheaper system worsen the current problem in those fields?

Of the six questions asked, the moderator picked this question out as the most interesting. He was an MEP, so it was nice to see this issue still touches a nerve - even moreso because he was a pro-swpat MEP (or was in 2005 at least).

The Commission speaker's reply was that the Community Patent doesn't aim to encourage more patents, weaker patents, or an increase of wrongly-granted patents - but she didn't explain how it wouldn't. She did say that being EU-wide, it would be easier to overturn wrongly-granted patents since they would only have to be overturned once instead of in every Member State. She also said that by making the granting process faster, the period of uncertainty would be reduced.

Those two points are not wrong, but they're help is not so great, and they definitely wouldn't cancel out the problems caused by the increased number of patents (which is inevitable if the process is faster, cheaper).

When talking about software patents, she constantly called them "wrongly granted" patents or "disguised software patents". This is consistent with the European Commission's position that software patents are not valid, but "computer implemented inventions" are valid. In reality, the latter is just a vague term which includes software patents. The European Commission's use of these funny terms and definitions makes meaningful dialogue difficult.

Asking a question won't have an immediate effect. Commission and Parliament speakers are ready for these questions. The point is that they have to be reminded constantly that we're still here, the problem is still here, and we still want a solution. If you're at such a meeting and no one else raises the issue of software patents or free software, you have to ask a question. It's also good practice. Asking questions is the best way to get good at asking good questions :-)

Miscellaneous

Aside from the above points, she mentioned in passing that the London Protocol had made progress and that France had now ratified it, and said that she hoped this would encourage others to also ratify it.

She also positioned the Community Patent as something that is meant to help the little guy. She went as far to say that Big Business is trying to stall the Community Patent behind the scenes - saying that Big Business doesn't want SMEs to have access to the patent system. She said the European Commission isn't changing the Community Patent in ways Big Business is asking for - "Big Business can take care of itself". This sort of talk is to be expected, given that it was an SME breakfast, but I thought it was interesting to note that this is how they're promoting it.

There was no mention of the issue of having a central court, and how impartial the judges would be, and how to avoid the EPO (the executive power) having power over the court (the judicial power). Maintaining this separation of powers is important.

Well, without getting too long, that's the summary of my notes. Probably the best way to ask questions would be to raise them on FSFE's discussion mailing list. And there's more information about software patents FSFE's Software Patents page.

In related news, FFII published a very interesting press release on another software patents topic yesterday: "McCreevy wants to legalise Software Patents via a US-EU patent treaty".

--
Ciarán O'Riordan,
Support free software: Join FSFE's Fellowship

Links: swpats, OLPC, MS+Blender

Mi, 14 Mai 2008 15:18:22 +0200

FFII PR: McCreevy wants to legalise Software Patents via a US-EU patent treaty
Sic Transit Gloria Laptopi - an insider's criticisms of the OLPC's seemed move toward MS Windows (with an interesting link to a New York Times article on the failure of cheap laptops as an educational tool).
Microsoft has asked for help from the Blender 3D project - the question is, does Microsoft deserve their help and what should be asked in return? Meaningful patent promises would be nice, as would (really) opening some file formats.
GPL wins in court again - short blog entry by Harald Welte about the recent victory against Skype.
Qwantz: Dinosaur Comics the recent ones have been good, but none stand out as excellent. The beginnings are usually better than the endings.

See also: Yesterday's links - the archive of my Links posts.

--
Ciarán O'Riordan,
Support free software: Join FSFE's Fellowship

Wikipedia's free software articles as of April 2008

Di, 13 Mai 2008 12:31:31 +0200

After the free software movement, Wikipedia has to be my favourite computer-enabled community project. It does a first rate job of getting computer users involved, it's articles can be freely copied and modified, and it has lots of useful info.

Since I blogged about it last year, English Wikipedia's Free Software Portal has continued to improve. The "Topics" and "Featured and Good content" boxes on the portal are interesting, as is the separate archive of highlighted articles. There are now also Free Software Portals on 15 of the Wikipedia's in other languages (compared to 6 in March 2007). For the list, see the box at the bottom of the left-hand column of the Portal.

As well as the articles having good info, the references sections at the bottom of each article are very useful. I often dig around the references when I'm looking for an old webpage or news article whose title I can't remember.

Here is a list of some good free software articles. They're good, but remember that you can improve them.

Of course, there are also plenty of articles that really should be better, such as:

And interesting related articles:

And there are hundreds of articles on specific free software packages: glibc, GCC, Emacs, OpenOffice.org, RockBox, etc.

The coordination WikiProject for Free Software is still there, but isn't used for much.

--
Ciarán O'Riordan,
Support free software: Join FSFE's Fellowship

Links: Net filtering, gNewSense, OLPC, Guile

Do, 08 Mai 2008 15:01:58 +0200

gNewSense 2.0 aka DeltaH is released.
The Guile project's new FAQ. Guile is GNU's embedable Scheme interpreter. Version 1.8.5 was just released.
Squaring The Net a French initiative against a proposed Internet filtering law.
Software patents and free software - Wikipedia's article on the relationship between the two. Contains good links. Maybe you can improve it. (Found on WP's Free Software portal)
RMS: Can we rescue OLPC from Windows? His April 29th blog entry (that I just saw now). Also discussed on Groklaw.
European Parliament testing GNU/Linux, OpenOffice.org, and Firefox (Firefox users might be interested in the GNUzilla/IceCat browser).

See also: Yesterday's links - the archive of my Links posts.

--
Ciarán O'Riordan,
Support free software: Join FSFE's Fellowship

The Open Parliament petition

Do, 17 Apr 2008 15:04:46 +0200

A few weeks ago, FSFE co-launched the Open Parliament petition, along with Esoma and OpenForum Europe. Here's a summary of why we're asking you to sign it, and we hope you'll point others to it.

The focus of this petition is to ask the European Parliament to review their policies for choosing software and for publishing data. We'd like the elected politicians to be able to choose free software and we'd like data to be published in open standards.

The online petition is not part of the official petitions process inside the European Parliament, but it is a way to show that this issue is important. On the openparliament.eu website you can see the text of the petition.

This text was written for the official internal petitions procedure of the European Parliament. It avoids technical details and it focusses on referencing related projects instead of making detailed requests. As far as I know, this is the normal style for petitions. Some studies will be done to define the details. FSFE is explicitly mentioned in the petition, so we will be involved in the process to ensure it does it's job of removing barriers to the use of free software.

The open standards aspects are important because when the European Parliment publishes videos in proprietary formats, they are pressuring EU citizens to use proprietary software.

In March, we made a joint press release and held a press conference in the European Parliament with MEPs David Hammerstein and Eva Lichtenberger. (Old friends from the anti-swpat campaign.)

--
Ciarán O'Riordan,
Support free software: Join FSFE's Fellowship

Open standards section on fsfeurope.org

Do, 17 Apr 2008 14:17:59 +0200

There's now an open standards project section on the fsfeurope.org website. There are links to our previous documents, including the ones about ISO and OOXML. Maybe most interesting is that there's a definition of open standards that we endorse. We didn't write this definition, but we took part in it's drafting, and many of our projects need to define "open standard" at some point, so this is the common definition we're using. Comments welcome, obviously.

There's also a new website section for hosting the leaflets that we have at our conference booths. Comments welcome there too (that is, unless you're going to say the formatting of the software patents leaflet is horrible - I just spotted that myself).

--
Ciarán O'Riordan,
Support free software: Join FSFE's Fellowship

RMS interview, GPLv3 adoption, GPL logos

Do, 03 Apr 2008 15:14:40 +0200

Datamation's James Maguire just published an article with an audience questions session and an interview of Richard Stallman. I think it's quite interesting. There's also a page 2 and a page 3.

On that kind of topic, Palamida's GPLv3 blog reports the number of GPLv3 projects has reached 2,000. I'll have to look into this however since a friend said his company's three GPLv3'd projects aren't listed, so the reported number may be a conservative estimate. I just also noticed that the Boycott Novell site has some cautionary advice for Palamida about how to describe licence risk.

And while I'm blogging, here's a link to new logos for projects using GPLv3 ...and while grabbing that link, I just noticed that FSF has launched a jobs directory.

--
Ciarán O'Riordan,
Support free software: Join FSFE's Fellowship

What to do with ISO and OOXML?

Do, 03 Apr 2008 12:11:49 +0200

So, FSFE is concerned about the ISO process, but the ISO process is not over, and the ISO process is not the only process. First, ISO endorsement does not automatically lead to endorsement by national governments. Second, there are still two months during which the ISO votes can be contested - and there are already a lot of allegations of voting irregularities.

The national level

Sometime in the future, separate to the ISO vote, each country will make its own decision to accept/reject the ODF and OOXML standards. Many countries have already accepted ODF.

Voting irregularities

OOXML needed 22 votes out of 32 to be approved. It got 24 because a lot of countries changed their vote in the last few days. Now there are numerous complaints about those votes. If 3 of those "approve" were changed back to "disapprove" in the next two months, then OOXML would be denied ISO certification.

UPDATE: Computerworld is carrying an article saying that the European Commission started investigating Microsoft's participation in February, and this story is also on CNet.

Noooxml.org also have a page of irregularities, and more stories will surely appear on Groklaw.

Related press releases

And, for what it's worth, here's a list of some press releases from organisations who were also against OOXML.

--
Ciarán O'Riordan,
Support free software: Join FSFE's Fellowship