"The commonwealth of Massachusetts has done a 180 degree turn and decided to support Microsoft's Office Open XML format in addition to the OASIS Open Document Format."

"Opinion: Congratulations, Microsoft; you've got everyone believing the big lie that Open XML is an open standard."

LINUX DISTRIBUTOR Linspire has shown what it is costing it to sign a deal with Microsoft over patents.

This morning a press release winged its way from Linspire which said the outfit was "joining the current efforts to improve the ability of OpenOffice.org users to work with the Office Open XML format by increasing the interoperability between ODF and Open XML".

John Battelle's ad network has roped in some of its star writers to an ad campaign on behalf of Microsoft's "people-ready" catchphrase. In the ads, and the companion site built by Federated Media, Michael Arrington explains how his Techcrunch site became "people-ready". "When is a business people ready?" asks Gigaom's Om Malik.

Toward the bottom of the page are a list of sponsors for the event. Microsoft is a gold sponsor along with Intel. Google, though, is a platinum sponsor. What is MS up to?

Open source software leaders said Wednesday they were unfazed by suggestions that Microsoft is attempting to divide the community and threaten it with lawsuits.

On the face of it, open-source software has been gaining ground of late. But behind the scenes, things are not quite as rosy. Some good ideas are too good for this world. Is this one of them?

Last time, we discussed Microsoft, their approach to protecting patents and why the enforcement of this is going to cost them much more than just some market share. Today, we will be taking this a step further by examining what they are losing out on by continuing with their dinosaur approach to creative property.