Miguel de Icaza, Microsoft MVP? Yep, it's true. The open-source rabble-rouser who was prevented from hosting a session inside Microsoft's 2005 Professional Developer Conference has been accepted into the ranks of the company's "Most Valuable Professionals" less than five years later. He announced the news on his blog.

I have compiled 23 of the most outstanding free/open source software. If these software have price tags, I would consider them the most expensive and valuable. The list was judged according to how I view their significance in the field of technology and the benefits that they have given to society.

Microsoft's comments on happenings outside its immediate product portfolio are rare, and all the more valuable when they do appear.

According to a recent tweet, Oracle (the company which recently acquired Sun Microsystems) has started to charge a license fee for its popular open office compatibility plug-in for Microsoft Office. Is this a signal for other open source and free software vendors to start charging for commercially valuable applications?

What's the best way to attract a pile of threatening lawyers' letters from Microsoft? Sell pirate copies of Windows? Write a DRM-busting program?

Londoner Jamie Cansdale has just discovered a new approach. He had the temerity to make Redmond's software better.

Advocating free and open source software often will go hand in hand with pointing out issues or problems with particular Microsoft strategies. Considering that FOSS is the only 'thing' left that competes with Microsoft on the same breadth of products and market places, it is no surprise that Microsoft sees the need to defend itself.

Based on Comes vs Microsoft exhibits, we already know that the company from Redmond is most afraid of GNU/Linux. There is no point in denying it and it is always valuable to see what the company says internally. In today's exhibit, Exhibit PX08256 (2001) [PDF], a revealing memo from Gates is shown publicly, probably for the first time at least on the Web.

The court indicted that it had seen no evidence to demonstrate that they contained ‘any intrinsically valuable invention'. The court was, in fact, singularly unimpressed by the ‘innovation' argument, something of a holy-cow in the US.

A reader has just sent us a little valuable headsup about the recently-reported news of South Africa adopting ODF.