Representatives of the state IT organizations of Brazil, South Africa and Venezuela, three of the four countries that protested ISO’s standardization of Microsoft’s Office Open XML (OOXML) file format, have apparently thrown in the towel on taking their appeal any further. India, the fourth protester, has not been heard from.

In a so-called "declaration" posted on the web site of Aslam Raffee, chairman of South Africa's Government IT Officer's Council Working Group on Open Standards Open Source Software, they say that "We do not intend to waste any more resources on lobbying our national bodies to pursue the appeals further" - but not before casting aspersions on ISO's vendor neutrality.

They claim the inaction of ISO/IEC/JTC-1 "reflects poorly on the integrity of these international standards development institutions."

"Given the organization's inability to follow its own rules," they say, "we are no longer confident that ISO/IEC will be capable of transforming itself into the open and vendor-neutral standards setting organization which is such an urgent requirement. What is now clear is that we will have to, albeit reluctantly, re-evaluate our assessment of ISO/IEC, particularly in its relevance to our various national government interoperability frameworks. Whereas in the past it has been assumed that an ISO/IEC standard should automatically be considered for use within government, clearly this position no longer stands."

The "declaration" at www.raffee.co.za was also signed by Cuba, Ecuador and Paraguay, countries that had not tried to appeal.

On August 20, ISO said that the complaints registered by India, South Africa, Brazil and Venezuela had "failed to garner sufficient support" from the ISO/IEC technical committees and so ISO was going to go ahead and publish OOXML as an ISO/IEC International Standard, ISO/IEC DIS 29500 - provided no other, effective appeal is registered.

ISO acknowledged all the dust raised over the standardization process itself - and implicitly the alleged Microsoft irregularities - and said the experience would "provide important input" for improving its processes.

ISO said the spec would be published in the next few weeks "on completion of final processing of the document."

According to ISO's arcane rules Brazil, India, South Africa and Venezuela apparently could have take their complaints to the Executive Councils of both ISO and IEC and drag the process out longer.

Of course nobody at ISO could remember anything like that happening in at least the last 20 years and couldn't imagine what grounds they would use since there's been no violation of ISO rules.

Microsoft critics can take comfort in the fact that the European Commission is investigating the allegations that Microsoft tilted the ISO playing field as part of its renewed probe of the company for still more antitrust violation.