IN MOST OPEN sauce fairy tales, little Linux developers tremble in fear at the mention of the big, bad Vole, but with Google and Intel now seemingly joining Microsoft in its huffing and puffing, the story of open sourcery could do with a refresh.

Further to this week's Microsoft Office crimes (and conviction) in Germany, the return on investment in OOXML corruption is debated

Troy Richardson and Steve Erdman go somewhere else, probably after the deal with Microsoft

Novell's CMO John Dragoon published this article in Forbes, so his subordinates promoted it in Novell's PR blog and his personal professional blog too. It was about "open source". Also mentioned in Tectonic was Novell's IDG "study" that we last mentioned in this post.

A quick update on Linspire and Xandros, which signed patent deals with Microsoft.

Novell does not want people to think that Microsoft has already acquired it; littering of YouTube resumes

Microsoft has made a "tremendous commitment" to systems and file interoperability, according to its head of North American sales and marketing. Robert Youngjohns on Wednesday called interoperability between Widows and Linux and support for open-file formats and open-source languages like PHP a business imperative.

Novell's role in Microsoft PR revisited, along with forgotten offences. OSBC 2009 had ended a short while ago and it was probably a little harsh to focus only on Microsoft's presence over there. Nonetheless, this is part of a pattern and it's clearly damaging to GNU/Linux and Free software.