The result, by Andy Updegrove: http://www.consortiuminfo.org/standardsblog/article.php?story=20080229055319...
Sean Daly interviews Andy Updegrove http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20080229171250199
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.
In the interview, Andy explains the importance of standards in society (access to government), why the ISO process was creaking under the strain of this application, and some comments on anti-trust law.
And if this puts you in the celebrating spirit, get involved in Document Freedom Day this March 26th: http://documentfreedom.org/
At last week's Ballot Resolution Meeting in Geneva, the national bodies had 1,100 issues to resolve. They resolved 20 to 30 substantial issues and adopted fixes for about 200 trivial issues, and then had a bulk vote on the rest. Only 10 countries agreed to cast a for/against vote and the result was 6-approve and 4-disapprove. 2 of those countries might actually have been ineligible to vote, in which case the result would be 4-4.
So there're about 900 problems with MS-suggested fixes which were ticked as approved without discussion of whether the fixes fix the problems, whether the fixes clash with each other, whether the fixes are themselves problematic, etc. A mess.
Despite this, people who were in Geneva tell me that it still looks realistic that OOXML *will* get ISO approval. So it looks like there's one more month of work to do before the real decision.
I've collected some good press and blog coverage here: http://fsfe.org/en/fellows/ciaran/ciaran_s_free_software_notes/coming_month_...
(I hope my above summary is accurate, but I'm no expert on this and I've been wrong before - the links are in the blog entry are more authoritative sources.)