I'm very happy to tell you that it's just been announced that the Peer-to-Patent project, which is a cooperative project between New York Law School and the USPTO, has been extended after the first year's trial. It's also been expanded to include business methods patents! Yum. I can't wait to see you try to invalidate some of those.

Microsoft's Office Open XML (OOXML) document format, which was technically approved in April as an international standard (ISO/IEC 29500), may be on its way toward surviving an appeals process -- the last challenge to its legitimacy as a standard.

As you know, Red Hat and FireStar settled their patent litigation in June. One of the terms required confidentiality for 30 days, but that time period is over, so we now have the agreement [PDF] itself to study, minus only the clause on financial terms. Red Hat VP and Assistant General Counsel Rob Tiller announced the release of the document today:

Here's South Africa's appeal against OOXML as text, our final section of our text versions of the entire memo [PDF] sent by the heads of ISO/IEC to the Technical Management Board suggesting that the four appeals against OOXML, attached as exhibits, be denied. The TMB decides what to do next. I know. Such suspense...

There has been a bit of a dustup about KDE 4.0. A lot of opinions have been expressed, but I thought you might like to hear from KDE. So I wrote to them and asked if they'd be willing to explain their choices and answer the main complaints. They graciously agreed.

The Government of Canada has angered those who believe that a proposed copyright law threatens the country's open source business model.

The ACTA is making its way in without resistance from top-level crooks and without any awareness from the public

Recently the makers of the free-as-in-cost iPhone jailbreaking utility PwnageTool discovered that someone was reselling their creation -- without permission, under a new name, and for profit. That's a situation no software developer wants to be in, but the PwnageTool team was in an even tougher position because of the license under which it released its code. It didn't have one.