FSFE, SIUG File Official Objections to Switzerland's Vote on MS-OOXML

.. and also threat of legal action.

1.7 Unfortunately, on the day before the Comment Resolution Meeting,
the NK 149 chairman sent an email message to the UK 14 members and
UK 14 chairman forbidding UK 14 to discuss any economic arguments,
forbidding explicitly the type of topic that is necessary to justify
or even discuss the validity of the concerned comment.  In this email,
the NK 149 chairman explicitly referred to his authority as chairman
of NK 149, the parent committee of UK, so that it was clear that
this message represented not just his personal opinion as a member of
UK 14, but a decision which would be binding for UK 14 (except, of
course, if SNV makes the decision to overrule him in this regard).
This email is archived here:
http://www.snvlivelink.ch/ll12/livelink?func=ll&objId=1284104

This sounds familiar to what has been happening in Malaysia to stop ODF being a Malaysian standard, except in this case Microsoft is stacking committees to make sure that OOXML goes through as an ISO standard. It's happening in multiple countries.

For those against corruption, this is another form of it. Every time I see a Microsoft deal with some government agency, I wonder what is involved in that decision.

If you haven't yet, please sign the petition http://www.noooxml.org/petition so that we can use a truly open and competitive standard (OpenDocument) vs a vendor lock in the form of (Microsoft OOXML).

As we move towards celebrating 50 years of independence, let us also move away from software dependence of unethical proprietary software foreign vendors such as Microsoft.