Rob Weir has taken a look at some semantics and considered again what it is that the world calls a “standard”: 'So, it is a document, a written description, not an embodiment in the form of a product, that is standardized.

As stressed many times before, IANAL, but based on the consensus of opinions in Groklaw, the GPLv3 is bound to bite companies that sold out to Microsoft in the rear. Several of these companies knew very well what they were getting into, or maybe they just weren’t concerned.

Experts have defended the Open Document Format standard against suggestions that its schema is broken, but the critic who highlighted the alleged flaws has defended his position.

"After falling victim to a domain and brand hijacking, Shareaza is fighting back at the scammers, assisted by the Software Freedom Law Centre, the EFF and Richard Stallman. "

Besides they just announced Shareaza 3.0 based on QT 4.4!!

The OOXML document format war is over, and the good guys lost. The world will be a worse place because of it, for a long time to come. After being a lobbyist for many months, it was a great relief to get back to being a Samba coder. At least that's something I feel I have some competence in. The jury is still out on my lobbying career.

I'm out at JavaOne in San Francisco this week and one discussion I've heard popping up with some regularity is, "Do we need to do something to protect open source in a cloud computing world?" I've written about aspects of this topic at length previously.

Earlier on we mentioned the Europe-based Blender and recently we also mentioned Microsoft’s role in pushing for software patents in Europe, using ‘proxies’ as large as the United States government. You may be interested in the following perspective on the latest Blender story.

Skype has abandoned its efforts to avoid complying with an open-source license that requires it to provide source code with Linux-based VoIP phones.