Four developing countries have appealed against the adoption of Microsoft's Office Open XML document format as an international standard.
Brazil, India, South Africa and Venezuela had appealed against the positive outcome of a vote the international standards body had giving the Microsoft's Open XML the thumbs up. If Microsoft gets the final ISO stamp of approval it will win more public-sector contracts, as some government bodies are nervous about storing archives in a proprietary format.
OOXML is not fully translatable into other document formats and there is already the open-source Open Document Format that is already recognised as an international standard. The International Electrotechnical Commission said it was having a shifty at the appeals and would submit them to their respective management boards. Then these will be looked at, filed, forgotten, recycled as fire lighters. Actually we made the last bit up.
