Ciaran O'Riordan ciaran@fsfe.org writes:
I'm no ISO procedure expert, but my understanding is: after 5 days of discussion, the voting members at ISO's Ballot Resolution Meeting decided not to approve the OOXML specification. There simply wasn't enough time to discuss the numerous problems and the numerous proposed solutions. The final decision will be in 30 days time, but since the issues raised last September are officially unresolved, rejection by ISO is almost certain.
Tim Bray, who was part of the BRM, has a blog post revealing how jaded he is on the whole matter.
Summary: A lot of good work was done, but the process is irretrievably broken. [...]
What Was Good · The people. With a very few exceptions, everyone really tried hard to work together and make the document better. [...]
What Was Bad [...] This was horrible, egregious, process abuse and ISO should hang their heads in shame for allowing it to happen. Their reputation, in my eyes, is in tatters. My opinion of ECMA was already very negative; this hasn’t improved it, and if ISO doesn’t figure out away to detach this toxic leech, this kind of abuse is going to happen again and again.
URL:http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2008/02/29/BRM-narrative