According to the FFII press release:

ISO members failed to disapprove the Open XML format. Microsoft has compromised the International Standards Organisation (ISO) during the rush to get a stamp for their Office OpenXML (OOXML), using unfair practices such as committee stuffing in several countries and political interventions of ministers in the standardization process. - -

The OOXML standard proposal, backed strongly by Microsoft, was originally rejected in an earlier 2 September 2007 vote, but accepted in the recent 2 April 2008 vote.

The vote consists of two parts, both of which must be passed. The differences in the voting behavior between the 2007 and 2008 votes shows the effect of the lobbying efforts by the Microsoft.

In the first part of the vote, the "Approval" and "Disapproval" votes of the P Members (including Secretariat, or the United States) are counted. At least 66.66% of the P Members must approve the standard. In 2008, 24 of 32 (75%) voted for approval.

Most approval votes were gained from the previously disapproving countries.

In the second part of the vote, the fraction of "Disapproval" votes (ignoring abstentions) can be at most 25% for all national bodies (not just ISO members). In 2008, 10 countries out of 71 (14%) voted for disapproval.

About half of the previously disapproved and abstained countries changed there vote to approval.

In the 2008 vote there was no significant correlation between the voting behaviour and the perceived corruption level of the voting country, unlike in 2007, when the corrupt countries were more likely to vote for approval. [Actually, in the recent vote only Canada and New Zealand of the low corruption countries (as defined by Transparency International's corruption perceptions index being at least 6) voted for disapproval. The majority of disapproval votes came from countries with relatively high levels of perveived corruption (Venezuela, Ecuador, Iran, Brazil, China and India have a below-median CPI; also Cuba and South Africa voted for disapproval).]

There will be a two-month period to allow national bodies to lodge any formal appeals before the standard proceeds to official publication. The story may not be over just yet:

• ISO approval: A good process gone bad (Red Hat Magazine 24 March 2008)
• Challenges coming to ISO Open XML vote? (CNET News.com 2 April 2008)
• And now the appeals and reactions while OOXML sits on hold (Groklaw 2 April 2008)
• Countries protest OOXML result (Australian IT 2 April 2008)
• OOXML passed (officially now), but it's not over yet (Truth Happens 2 April 2008)
• Regarding OOXML and the need for change (Bob Sutor 2 April 2008)
• Isoja ongelmia Microsoftin ISO-standardiehdotuksessa (Effi 26 March 2008) [in Finnish]
• EU epäilee Microsoftin väärinkäyttäneen valtaansa ooxml-standardoinnissa (Tietoviikko 3 April 2008) [in Finnish]

Material

• The voting data in CSV format (can be accessed with most spreadsheet etc. software)
• Description of the voting data
• R code used to analyze the data

This document is Public Domain.