... Microsoft forgot to pay someone off.

I'd imagine that a visit, with the strategic placement of currency, will solve this problem for them shortly.

This from the county whos idea of a cure for aids is eating betroot, and whos president thinks you can wash aids off in a shower.

Surprised they are asked for their poinion, but then perhaps the OOXML requires 'speshal muti' ....

Anan on case noted wishdokta comes a visiting with his shambok :)

Now how do we contact the British standards body to convince them to lodge an objection as well?

Now that SABS is the first to speak out, hopefully some other national standards bodies will follow suit. Shouldn't take many to scuttle the nightmare that is OOXML.

Pity BSI don't have the same integrity.

A white southafrican, hans?

Because that was a complete waste of time there. Mind you, it did get me to remember a catchy song from Spitting Image:

"I've never met a nice South African

and that's not bloody suprising, man.

Cos they're a bunch of arrogant bastards

with no sense of humour"

Pik Botha's last words: "It's all going blik"

Meanwhile the nations with real balls are the ones that told Microsoft to take a flying leap with their "incentives" and voted No right from the start. Countries like Cuba, Brazil, New Zealand and India amongst others all showed the size of their cojones by t-bagging Microsoft in the vote.

I can only assume you're not South African, judging by your copious cluelessness.

And on the subject of beetroot and garlic, luckily one hopelessly incompetent health minister does not an entire nation make...

Now El Reg readers know for sure that South African's are slow, dense but exceptional sportsmen. When will we shake this damn stigma!

To sum up:-

Hans, you're a soap dodger if ever I seen one, me hearties.

OOXML sounds like a brand of hair gel, it should be voted out for that reason alone.

Yeah, that's the one, the one with the two day old cheese sandwich in the right hand pocket.

Is that Dutch name by any chance?

Oh dear.

"That decision follows months of heated arguments on both sides the OOXML debate, with ISO-approved OpenDocument Format (ODF) fanciers in one corner and lovers of Microsoft’s spec in the other."

I think you mean "lover" singular - the Great Beast. Anyone who has so much as glanced as the spec has vomited out of their eye sockets. If, for some reason, that hasn't put them off and they've spent more than five minutes looking at it, they come out in hives. The really intrepid adventurer developers who are in it "for the experience" find themselves kidnapped at gunpoint BY THEIR OWN BRAINS and forced to eat a bowl of eye balls and hives in vomit. It really is quite horrific.

Although I hear those on the payroll are willing to put up with eye-vomit in return for special treats from MS-central, which they've yet to realise are hollow, empty promises. "Hey, we can get Vista in our schools for three years with a 5% discount!"

At last! a country WITH a brain, well done South Africa, shame others haven't had the balls. Here's hoping your action starts the ballssssss rolling!

You are confused mate, South Africa was the originator of the little knowm company called Verisign you may have heard of it, And also a little known Linux distro called Ubuntu, but then again you have probably not heard of either.

What did the German say when he pushed his mate of a cliff?? "Look ma, no Hans!"

Eeeek, boet, please don't go proving everyone right and showing your complete ignorance. VeriSign was *NOT* started in South Africa. From the Wikipedia article (I'm too lazy to go hunt through their site to find their history, this will suffice):

"VeriSign was founded in 1995 as a spin-off of the RSA Security certification services business."

They went on to aquire Thawte Technologies from Mark Shuttleworth in 1999. Thawte originated in South Africa and was started by Shuttleworth. As an aside, RSA Security has nothing to do with the Republic of South Africa. Rather, the RSA bit was "named for the RSA public key cryptography algorithm, which was in turn named for the initials of its co-inventors: Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Len Adleman."

An all I did was a bit of research on Wikipedia (you may have heard of it) and I didn't even need to check on Google (you may have heard ot if).

Paris, because she might've Thawte that VeriSign started in the RSA too. Confusing, ne?