In [a] letter released Friday, Microsoft execs Tom Robertson and Jean Paoli stress that customers worldwide deserve choice and flexibility in standard file formats. They also paint Microsoft as taking pains to avoid confrontation over standards.

Just as Microsoft Paint is included with every Windows installation, so KolourPaint has been part of the kdegraphics package since KDE 3.3. This simple raster graphics editor works well not only in KDE, but also in Xfce, GNOME, and Fluxbox.

Far from being the evil monopolist, Microsoft has in many ways become the cooperative giant—and it's all thanks to intellectual property. The company's IP czar takes us inside the corporate transformation in a new book, Burning the Ships, to show us how it happened (and to take a few potshots at Richard Stallman).

Paint.NET is one of the best image editing applications for Windows and it has a version for Linux too, called Paint.Mono (or Mono Paint). According to Miguel de Icaza, most of the features in Paint.NET have been ported over to Paint-Mono, with more to come. Apparently, this should also work on Mac OSX, details HERE.

Sign petition: Say NO to the Microsoft Office format as an ISO standard.Microsoft is currently trying to make the ISO National Bodies believe that its Office Open XML (OOXML) format is a good standard. This website discusses why this broken proprietary standard should never be accepted by ISO.

For years Microsoft has had the de facto "standard" everything simpy because the majority of people use it and think it is the standard. Microsoft never did anything about this. It enjoyed the de facto standard position and never actually sought to makes it formats actual standards. But in 2006 something happened.

More evidence that HTC merely settled (probably after threats) rather than be wooed for a patent deal as Microsoft would like to paint it

A lot of Microsoft news can paint a grim picture. The following accumulation of news from the past week will hopefully shed light on the problems Microsoft as a whole is facing. It is well deserved.

Microsoft's aggressive defense of its intellectual property, which includes claims that Linux violates a number of its patents, is nothing more than "a marketing thing," according to Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux kernel.