The Andalusian Goverment has reported recently the manipulation of Microsoft in the National Technical Committee 71 of AENOR. On July 10th, just the day before the one and only meeting of AENOR to study DIS 29500 and vote on it, Microsoft announced officially (via the secretary of the Committee) that the Andalusians and several other Spanish public entities were asking for the approval of ISO DIS 29500 (what finally resulted all a fake!).
Once Andalusia was aware of "its" fake backing to DIS 29500, the official (reply) letter of the Andalusian Government to the Ministry of Industry, the holder of AENOR national standardisation body, is quite strong in terms of diplomacy and asks for notification and an explanation of how is it possible that that situation happens on an "as important and wide standardization process".
Indeed, both, the initial letter and the denounce letter, remark that Andalusia already have decided that their electronic document standard format is already stablished on ISO 26300.
FFII has been awared that all this has been made public in an annonimous denounce to a lawyers association in Spain that collects the denounces against the abuse of software monopolies in Spanish public administrations. They have certified the origionallity of all the reported original documents attached to the disclosing report: Denounce in Spanish with the original documents linked
All this happened one and two weeks ago or so respectivelly, but unfortunatelly all this information was under confidentiallity terms… until now that has been disclosed by Neutralidad.es.
The vote in Spanish AENOR is currently in process via post mail. The deadline is July, 26th.
About Andalusia:
Andalusia is the biggest region of Spain with +8 mio. inhabitants and its Government manages the biggest public budget of the country. Andalusia is well known also because has opted clearly for free software as a way to develop its growing IT industry. Andalusian region is currently one of the biggest users of free software in world with more than 200.000 clients running only Guadalinex (a well known local Ubuntu linux flavour) in education and more than 235.000 registered citizens in their public centers of IT rural alphabetization (access to Internet + daily training to population), apart of some other initiatives.
