France votes No with comments.
Link :http://www.lemondeinformatique.fr/actualites/lire-open-xml-la-france-dit-non-23833.html
Translation : "No with comments, this is the position of France on OOXML. AFNOR, ISO NB for France, just made the results available after two storm sessions held on august 28 and 29. France joins the ranks of No voters, with India, Denmark, New-Zealand, Norway and Brazil".
-Stephane Rodriguez
PS : there was actually no vote. The consensus was 70% against OOXML based on a preliminary phase that allowed many actors of the industry to provide feedback directly to AFNOR. On august 28 and 29, Microsoft and their business partners wanted to object this, presumably they wanted a vote. Also, no less than 93 companies sent non-technical letters in favor of OOXML on behalf of Microsoft (companies such as Caisse D'epargne, …). AFNOR has not disclosed whether those non-technical letters have had any effect on the position.
PS 2 : the president of committee in AFNOR was no other than CleverAge, Microsoft contractor who worked on a (useless and broken) file format converter for Microsoft. Many of their partners were part of the voting committee (again, the vote did not occur, ultimately), including AFDEL (pro-software patent org, funded by Microsoft and BSA), Wygwam (Microsoft regional director), SoftFluent (ex-Microsoft), Microsoft France, …
PS 3 : according to the AFNOR mailing list, Microsoft is reported to try to destroy comments against OOXML that were pushed by industry in the preliminary phase. My guess is that they are trying to reduce the effect of the No vote as much as they can.
