I wish I knew how to fix it but I don’t. What I do know however is that the ISO/IEC process is severally broken in that it is riddled with room for game play. I guess ISO/IEC managed to get away with it for a long time but things have changed now that Microsoft has shown how to use every loophole in the process to get to its end.

At a time when the EU Commission investigates the anti-competitive behaviour of a market-dominant player, the European Parliament (EP) still imposes that same specific software choice on both the European Union's citizens and its own MEPs.

From the start Patrick has remained publicly silent on the topic of OOXML. No blog posts, no press, nothing. If you asked, he would say that this was his policy. Privately, you would get an earful (all negative), but as befits the unbiased chair of the committee which is responsible for the technical recommendation for the US NB, he kept his personal opinions out of the public arena.

Funambol, the leading provider of Mobile 2.0 messaging software powered by open source, today announced that the AGPLv3 has received formal approval by the Open Source Initiative (OSI). Funambol led the process of the license's approval by the OSI after adopting AGPLv3 in November. It was the first company to adopt the license, which closes the "ASP loophole".

A company called Savoir-Faire Linux, Inc. has filed in the Superior Court of Quebec against the government's pension plan for choosing Microsoft software without putting the job out publicly for bid. It seems the law in Quebec is very strict that the government is supposed to publish an invitation to tender for any acquisition of more than $25,000, and this job was a good deal more than that.

It is one case to walk through 7000 pages of rather technical documentation and to try to extract something useful out of it for a concrete question. It is another thing to look at the actual XML produced by the Microsoft Office 2007 suite.

The Fedora Project Board wants our project to remain in
compliance with Free and Open Source Software licenses. We also
want to make sure our Ambassadors are properly following those
licenses when they distribute Fedora. By making sure we are
meeting our obligations under these licenses, we protect Fedora
and all its contributors, including you, our Ambassadors.

As regular readers will have noticed, I haven't blogged in awhile. This is in part because I'm on the road for most of six weeks, but also because the news about OOXML continues to be both more predictable as well as more intense.