The Ballot Resolution Meeting to discuss the technical comments arising from the fast track process to have Microsoft’s Office Open XML formats accepted as an ISO standard was held last week in Geneva.

Microsoft says it is "optimistic" that the Office Open XML specification will be made into an ISO standard, despite a national body describing the ballot resolution process as "bulls**t".

Here's one from the file of random stuff you see when you put a new machine on the upstream kernel instead of the distro kernel. USB drivers for Linux will be GPL-only with the release of the upcoming kernel 2.6.25.. USB maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman writes: "Over two years ago, the Linux USB developers stated that they believed there was no way to create a USB kernel driver that was not under the GPL. This patch moves the USB apis to enforce that decision."

The ISO folk have put out a press release about how wonderful the BRM worked out and what happens next. However, it tells us little people to stay out.

The European Commission is investigating the process under which a key Microsoft document format could be adopted as an industry standard - a move that would carry significant commercial benefits for the software company.

The Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) and High-Gain Antennas today jointly announced that an agreement has been reached to dismiss the GPL enforcement lawsuit filed by SFLC on behalf of two principal developers of BusyBox.

"WaveMaker has announced the release of its WaveMaker Visual Ajax Studio version 3.1.1, a tool for building database-driven Ajax Web applications without having to write complex code. [...] It's interesting to see the new GNU AGPL – the Affero General Public Licence – being adopted here..."

In the wake of the ISO rejecting Microsoft's OOXML document format as an international standard, Microsoft has launched its Document Interoperability Initiative pledging to work with industry to ensure its document formats remain interchangeable with industry standards.