IBM has just announced a new corporate policy regarding its "behavior when helping to create open technical standards".

This is the full text of the essay I wrote for the O'Reilly Open Government book, in which I discuss what open file formats and other digital standards really mean for us, why they are often even more important than Free Software and why Government must lead the way when it comes to their adoption.

The World Intellectual Property Organization’s (WIPO) is organizing on October 29 and 30, 2007 at its Geneva headquarters an International Conference on Intellectual Property and the Creative Industries.

Beijing's Tsinghua University and Mozilla China have jointly developed a new Internet browser product that is specially designed for IPv6. Based on the core of Firefox, the new browser product, with the help of IPv6 tunnel technologies, enables smooth access to some IPv6, Facebook, and Google services, which are usually unstable and/or blocked in China.

"On Saturday 09/15/2007, Mozilla Online sponsored and participated in Software Freedom Day in Beijing, which was part of a gloabl event held around the world. The Beijing event was held at the FIT building at Tsinghua University..."

This week the Dutch government will discuss a proposal to switch as much as possible to open standards and open source software. The Microsoft director for the Netherlands, Theo Rinsema, responded that Microsoft is not objecting to open standards, but the proposal excludes too many not open standards, like PDF, MP3 and GSM, which are widely accepted standards.

In April I attended a meeting of FLOSS lawyers in Amsterdam. One of the things I got to talk about there was some directions for FLOSS related policy - which turns out to be unusually relevant because the Australian Government is conducting a review into innovation in Australia.

IBM declared in a new corporate policy that it was establishing new IT standards and redefining its ties with the International Standards Organization (ISO). If developing countries want to develop their own standards, IBM is willing to support them. Ramifications are clear regarding the turbulent debate around acceptance of Microsoft's Open Office XML (OOXML) data format.

On April 19, one day before an open source advocate protested Bill Gates' visit to Tsinghua University in Beijing, McNealy, who lives in a Microsoft-free household and believes everyone should have a smart Java Latest News about Java chip behind their ears, sat down with China Daily reporter Wang Xing to talk about his experiences.