Arnaud Lehors of IBM is mentioning on his blog the conflict of interest on the recent vote in INCITS:
In the latest demonstration of how broken the process is the US V1 technical committee voted on Friday to recommend approval of OOXML in a 17-4 vote, where Microsoft and no fewer than 11 of its business partners voted in favor of the specification. Am I the only one to see a major conflict of interest at play in this?
Here is the list of the members of the committee:
03/07/2008
INCITS V1
Text Processing: Office and Publishing Systems Interface3Sharp
Advaiya
Blackbird Technologies Inc
BP Corporation North America Inc
Farance Inc
Fortified DataCom
IBM Corporation
Ligent
Microsoft Corporation
Mimosa Systems Inc
Mindjet Corporation
NextPage
Oracle Corporation
Patrick Durusau Inc
Peters & Associates
Red Hat
Revonet
Sun Microsystems Inc
Text Structure Consulting
United States Dept of Defense / DISA
Xinnovation Inc
Y-12 National Security Complex
Question for the readers: which companies are Microsoft Business Partners?