It seems appropriate that Sweden, the original home of MySQL, should be part of the ancient Norse territories, for the MySQL open/closed code story is threatening to turn into a saga as long and as complex as Njal's.

Life is never easy for an open source evangelist. The OOXML drama came to a close on 2nd April 2008 and we were on to our next issue -- software patents. The Draft Patent Manual might end up bringing software patents through the back door. this would be surprising because the Indian parliament explicitly rejected software patents in the Patent Amendment Act 2005.

In this continued pursuit for identification of attacks on GNU/Linux we spot some other (old & new) intrusion vectors. We previously mentioned the push in the UK to crack down on — or at least expose (in the transparency sense alone, i.e. no action) — heavy corporate lobbying activities, which are akin to bribery that’s legalised, no matter how questionable this analogy may seem.

KDE’s KOffice has just reached Alpha 7 and it revolves around OpenDocument format. KDE deserves some praises for refusing to touch OOXML with its the anti-FOSS poison pill (RAND+OSP), in addition to the impossibility of implementing something that nobody else will ever implement, not even Microsoft.

Peter Judge, over at ZDNet UK, continues to publish articles about Alex Brown’s stubborn battle against ODF, which even Alex himself considers to be analogous to “a neat house built on good foundations”.

It was probably a little hasty to say that MySQL remains open source (or Free software, with the GPL). That’s what many headlines state, but not so fast! As Matt Asay quickly pointed out, there is more to this story.

Back in March we provided a long list of examples where, for the sake of people’s lives and for faster research, companies decided to share their discoveries and collaborate. Withholding information means a/n (competitive) advantage to whom? What about the ethics of patents on surgical procedures?

In Atlantic v. Boyer, in Tampa, Florida, the RIAA's motion to dismiss counterclaims has been denied. The counterclaims are for civil conspiracy, extortion, illegal investigations, computer fraud, trespass, deception, and abuse of process.