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After member states filed four complaints against the standardisation of Microsoft's Office Open XML (OOXML) document format, the International Standards Organisation (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) in Geneva have responded by postponing publication of the revised specification. As the ISO announced, the planned ISO/IEC DIS 29500 cannot be published until these complaints have been heard. Procedure requires that they be dealt with by the end of June, when the ISO and IEC have to hand over their comments on the complaints to two management committees for a final decision.

Now that there have been at least three official appeals filed against OOXML, by South Africa, Brazil and India, as well as a letter of protest from a participant entity at the BRM over the way matters were handled in Denmark, I thought this might be an excellent time to take a moment and remind ISO of its published Code of Ethics [PDF]. Here's just a bit of it, some words to live by, or at least words I hope they will live by, as they decide what to do with the appeals. And then some information on what happens next.

Jeremy Allison -- best known as one-half of Samba's leadership team with Andrew Tridgell -- has resigned from Novell in protest over the company's patent agreement with Microsoft. Allison, who left HP to join Novell in April of 2005, will leave the company at the end of the month. He was Novell's Lead Developer on the company's Samba team.

SUSE co-founder Hubert Mantel is back in the saddle at Novell. Back in November of 2005 when the well-respected chief maintainer of the SUSE Linux kernel left Novell, he said in an email announcing his resignation that "This is no longer the company I founded 13 years ago."