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India has decided to favour the Open Document Format and has rejected Microsoft’s Open Office extensible Markup Language (OOXML). A 21-member technical committee comprising of government and private officials said India would vote a ‘no’ against OOXML standard at the International Standards Organisation (ISO) in Geneva on September 2.

“We unanimously agree on the disapproval of OOXML with comments. The same will be submitted to ISO,” National Informatics Centre head and BIS technical committee chairperson Nita Verma said. Among the private companies, Infosys, India’s second largest software services exporter and CSI supported the Microsoft standard.

The Open Document Format (ODF) alliance being backed by Oracle, IBM, Red Hat, Sun Microsystems, Google, was in a jubilant mood after stalling OOXML from being accepted as a standard in India.

Caught between its own companies fighting for the document format, the US government has decided to abstain from voting. China has already voted a ‘No’ against Microsoft, while Malaysia, Denmark and Switzerland are supporting Microsoft.

A global alliance of Sun-IBM, Oracle, Google, Red Hat have teamed up against Microsoft and are being backed by Apple, Quark, Accenture and Novell. In India, Infosys, HCL, Skelta Software, Sonata Software and Sify are supporting Microsoft.

About 123 counties are participating in the vote. Votes from most are still to come. Canada, Czech Republic, Iran, Japan, Libya, Cuba, New Zealand, UK are likely to back the IBM-Sun’s ODF Alliance. On the other hand, Belgium, Finland, Italy, Spain, Brazil, Singapore, Korea, France and Australia are likely to abstain from voting.