At yesterday's the Swedish Standards Institute, which met to discuss the standard, suddenly reversed its position to be in favour of Vole's glorious open standard. Previously members looked at the standard in a funny way and did not trust it any more than they could throw Steve Ballmer.

The dramatic conversion seems to be as a result of a large group of Vole's partners who suddenly showed up and stacked the meeting. According to OS2World, each of the members, who had previously shown no interest in the workings of the group, stumped up $2444 USD to attend.

These included Camako Data, Connecta, Cornerstone Sweden, Cybernetics, Emric, Exor, Fishbone Systems, Formpipe Software, FS System, Google, HP, IBizkit, IDE Nätverkskonsulterna, IT-Vision, Know IT, Modul1, Nordic Station, ReadSoft, Sogeti, Solid Park, SourceTech, Strand Interconnect and TietoEnator.

Google was the only late comer who opposed the Vole.

Big Blue representative Johan Westmans huffed that the whole thing was a farce and stormed out, as did Jonas Bosson who participated on behalf of the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure. There were several others who were in favour of the OpenDocument standards who joined them angrily outside. This left Vole's partners mostly in charge of the meeting.

Not surprisingly the vote was 25 in favour of the Voleware, six against.

More here. µ