Our correspondent AK reports from Azerbaijan:
I have finally reached Mr Azer Taghiev, the head of IT Section of AZSTAND (Azerbaijan standardization body).
According to his information, the proposal was rushed and approved more than a month ago. He was not able to provide concrete details about the outcome of the vote, was not even able to provide with the official text about the decision. He recommended contacting Vladimir Tchaikovsky, the head of Microsoft Azerbaijan office, who happens to have the official decision/voting text about the 'approved' proposal.
I was under the impression he did not understand what the proposal was about, though he assured me the approval was final.
FYI, according to Azerbaijan open source contacts, Microsoft recently abolished FLOSS products from Azerbaijan schools by offering 4 and 7 USD licenses for MS XP and Office to schools. As a result, open source products remains only on very few experimental schools."
I just have one question: if Microsoft believes that its standard is good, why does it have to resort to such tactics in order to get it past the ISO process?